“…Furthermore, this system is considered as an alternative candidate to traditional organic solvents and ionic liquids. 11 First, by rationally introducing a flexible hydroxyl group into the well-known gelator DBS, we generated 4-(hydroxymethyl)-1,3:2,4-dibenzylidene- d -sorbitol 4 (HMDBS) in good yield and confirmed its identity using NMR, IR and mass spectroscopy techniques (ESI, Fig. S2–5†).…”