Chiral supramolecular catalysts (CSCs) have been established to possess favorable catalytic efficiency and enantioselectivity. However, their intrinsic drawbacks of severe organic solvent dependency and poor thermal stability of supramolecular self-assembled nanostructures largely limit their practical applications. Herein, we demonstrate that highly durable supported CSCs self-assembled from l-phenylglycine-based amphiphiles can be obtained by introducing mesoporous materials (such as carbon or silica with varied pore sizes) through a mesopore-confined self-assembly strategy. The resulting supported CSCs can be desolvated and annealed at temperatures higher than 100 °C while maintaining the self-assembled nanostructure and supramolecular chirality. Using the Diels–Alder reaction between aza-chalcone and cyclopentadiene as an example, the annealed mesoporous material-supported CSCs (loading Cu(II) ions as catalytic active centers) can display catalytic enantioselectivity with 94% enantiomeric excess (ee) in a methanol/water solvent and 84% ee in pure water as a more eco-friendly solvent, while the unsupported counterparts do not show any enantioselectivity in both solvents. The developed mesopore-confined self-assembly strategy provides a viable approach for the facile and scalable preparation of highly durable supported CSCs that can be potentially utilized in practical applications.
Wu et al. (2026) studied this question.