Chiral polyoxometalate-based materials: From design syntheses to functional applications

Owing to the potential applications in catalysis, analytical chemistry, ion exchange, magnetism, biological chemistry and medicine, tremendous effort has been dedicated to exploring polyoxometalate (POM) chemistry. Chiral POM-based materials are particularly attractive due to the combination of the advantage of POMs with the importance of chirality. Nearly 100 chiral POM-based compounds were reported, which were mainly used as asymmetric catalysts, molecular recognition and nonlinear optical materials. In addition, the chirality within POM systems has attracted the attention of theoretical chemists and research was carried out to explore the origin of chirality by density functional theoretical methods. In this review, we summarize the developments of chiral POM-based materials, including their synthetic strategies, calculations on the origin of chirality and the relevant applications. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.