A novel type of small organic gelators: bis(amino acid) oxalyl amides

Abstract

Bis(S)-leucine (1) and bis-(R)-α-phenylglycine (2) oxalyl amides are discovered to be efficient small organic gelling agents capable of gelating water while their stereoisomers meso-1 and meso-2 as well as their racemates are found to be non-gelling and poorly gelling, respectively; IR, fluorescence emission spectroscopy and TEM are used to study assemblies of (S,S)-1 and (R,R)-2 in gels.