November 30th, 2014
Pursuing the topic of halogen bonds, the system DABCO (a tertiary dibase) and iodine form an intriguing complex. Here I explore some unusual features of the structure HEKZOO[1] as published in 2012[2] and ask whether the bonding between the donor (N) and the acceptor (I-I) really is best described as a “non-covalent-interaction” (NCI) or not.
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References
- Peuronen, A.., Valkonen, A.., Kortelainen, M.., Rissanen, K.., and Lahtinen, M.., "CCDC 879935: Experimental Crystal Structure Determination", 2013. https://doi.org/10.5517/ccyjn03
- A. Peuronen, A. Valkonen, M. Kortelainen, K. Rissanen, and M. Lahtinen, "Halogen Bonding-Based “Catch and Release”: Reversible Solid-State Entrapment of Elemental Iodine with Monoalkylated DABCO Salts", Crystal Growth & Design, vol. 12, pp. 4157-4169, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1021/cg300669t
Tags: bond energy, co-operative, donor-acceptor interaction energy
Posted in Interesting chemistry | 5 Comments »
November 29th, 2014
Halogen bonds are less familiar cousins to hydrogen bonds. They are defined as non-covalent interactions (NCI) between a halogen atom (X, acting as a Lewis acid, in accepting electrons) and a Lewis base D donating electrons; D….X-A vs D…H-A. They are superficially surprising, since both D and X look like electron rich species. In fact the electron distribution around X-X (A=X) is highly anisotropic, with the electron rich distribution (the "donor") being in a torus encircling the bond, and an electron deficient region (the "acceptor") lying along the axis of the bond.
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Tags: crystal structure search, D. Note, frequent commentator, Paul Schleyer
Posted in crystal_structure_mining, Interesting chemistry, reaction mechanism | No Comments »
November 12th, 2014
In London, one has the pleasures of attending occasional one day meetings at the Burlington House, home of the Royal Society of Chemistry. On November 5th this year, there was an excellent meeting on the topic of Challenges in Catalysis, and you can see the speakers and (some of) their slides here. One talk on the topic of Direct amide formation – the issues, the art, the industrial application by Dave Jackson caught my interest. He asked whether an amide could be formed directly from a carboxylic acid and an amine without the intervention of an explicit catalyst. The answer involved noting that the carboxylic acid was itself a catalyst in the process, and a full mechanistic exploration of this aspect can be found in an article published in collaboration with Andy Whiting's group at Durham.[1] My after-thoughts in the pub centered around the recollection that I had written some blog posts about the reaction between hydroxylamine and propanone. Might there be any similarity between the two mechanisms?
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References
- H. Charville, D.A. Jackson, G. Hodges, A. Whiting, and M.R. Wilson, "The Uncatalyzed Direct Amide Formation Reaction – Mechanism Studies and the Key Role of Carboxylic Acid H‐Bonding", European Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol. 2011, pp. 5981-5990, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.201100714
Tags: Andy Whiting, Dave Jackson, dielectric, Durham, energy profile, free energy barrier, London, non-polar solution, PDF, Royal Society of Chemistry
Posted in reaction mechanism | 6 Comments »
November 6th, 2014
Solvolytic mechanisms are amongst the oldest studied, but reproducing their characteristics using computational methods has been a challenging business. This post was inspired by reading Steve Bachrach’s post, itself alluding to this aspect in the title “Computationally handling ion pairs”. It references this recent article on the topic[1] in which the point is made that reproducing the features of both contact and solvent-separated ion pairs needs a model comprising discrete solvent molecules (in this case four dichloromethane units) along with a continuum model.
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References
- T. Hosoya, T. Takano, P. Kosma, and T. Rosenau, "Theoretical Foundation for the Presence of Oxacarbenium Ions in Chemical Glycoside Synthesis", The Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol. 79, pp. 7889-7894, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1021/jo501012s
Tags: 10.1021, Steve Bachrach
Posted in reaction mechanism | No Comments »
November 1st, 2014
Egon Willighagen recently gave a presentation at the RSC entitled “The Web – what is the issue” where he laments how little uptake of web technologies as a “channel for communication of scientific knowledge and data” there is in chemistry after twenty years or more. It caused me to ponder what we were doing with the web twenty years ago. Our HTTP server started in August 1993, and to my knowledge very little content there has been deleted (it’s mostly now just hidden). So here are some ancient pages which whilst certainly not examples of how it should be done nowadays, give an interesting historical perspective. In truth, there is not much stuff that is older out there!
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Tags: 3D printing language, ACS, BBC, Bryan Levitt, chemical audience, chemical information technologies, Darek Bogdal, Fortran, Guillaume Cottenceau, HTML, http, Java, large supermarket chain, personal Web presence, Python, researcher, spectroscopy, Tesco, Virtual reality, WATOC, web technologies
Posted in Chemical IT, Historical | No Comments »
November 1st, 2014
We are approaching 1 million recorded crystal structures (actually, around 716,000 in the CCDC and just over 300,00 in COD). One delight with having this wealth of information is the simple little explorations that can take just a minute or so to do. This one was sparked by my helping a colleague update a set of interactive lecture demos dealing with stereochemistry. Three of the examples included molecules where chirality originates in stereogenic centres with just three attached groups. An example might be a sulfoxide, for which the priority rule is to assign the lone pair present with atomic number zero. The issue then arises as to whether this centre is configurationally stable, i.e. does it invert in an umbrella motion slowly or quickly. My initial intention was to see if crystal structures could cast any light at all on this aspect.
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Tags: energy, overlap/energy match, search definition
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining | No Comments »
October 9th, 2014
This second report highlights two “themes”, or common ideas that seem to emerge spontaneously from diversely different talks. Most conferences do have them.
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Tags: Complex Biological Systems, condensation, gas-phase molecular species, metal surface catalysis, molecular systems, non-crystalline systems, organic chemist, organometallic systems, potential energy surface, representative, Stefan Grimme, Thus Emily Carter
Posted in Interesting chemistry, WATOC reports | 1 Comment »
October 6th, 2014
I am attending a conference. Plenaries at such events can sometimes provide interesting pointers on things to come (and sometimes they simply point to things past). At WATOC2014 in Santiago Chile, the first plenary was by Paul Ayers with the impressive title “Concepts for organising chemical knowledge” which certainly sounds as if it is pointing forward!
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Tags: chemical knowledge, chemical philosophy, chemical rules, Chile, Paul Ayers, Paul Geerlings, Santiago, World Association of Theoretical and cOmputational Chemists
Posted in Interesting chemistry | No Comments »
September 16th, 2014
ELNs (electronic laboratory notebooks) have been around for a long time in chemistry, largely of course due to the needs of the pharmaceutical industries. We did our first extensive evaluation probably at least 15 years ago, and nowadays there are many on the commercial market, with a few more coming from opensource communities. Here I thought I would bring to your attention the potential of an interesting new entrant from the open community.
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Tags: .com, chemical sketches, Java, JavaScript, lecturer, molecular editor, PDF, pharmaceutical industries, Silicon Graphics, three technologies, web browsers, Web-based behaviour
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
September 8th, 2014
In the beginning (taken here as prior to ~1980) libraries held five-year printed consolidated indices of molecules, organised by formula or name (Chemical abstracts). This could occupy about 2m of shelf space for each five years. And an equivalent set of printed volumes from the Beilstein collection. Those of us who needed to track down information about molecules prior to ~1980 spent many an afternoon (or indeed a whole day) in the libraries thumbing through these weighty volumes. Fast forward to the present, when (closed) commercial databases such as SciFinder, Reaxys and CCDC offer information online for around 100 million molecules (CAS indicates it has 89,506,154 today for example). These have been joined by many open databases (e.g. PubChem). All these sources of molecular information have their own way of accessing individual entries, and the wonderful program Jmol (nowadays JSmol) has several of these custom interfaces programmed in. Here I describe some work we have recently done[1] on how one might generalise access to an individual molecule held in what is now called a digital data repository.
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References
- M.J. Harvey, N.J. Mason, and H.S. Rzepa, "Digital Data Repositories in Chemistry and Their Integration with Journals and Electronic Notebooks", Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, vol. 54, pp. 2627-2635, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci500302p
Tags: Digital Object Identifier, XML
Posted in Chemical IT | No Comments »
Halogen bonds: Part 1.
November 29th, 2014Halogen bonds are less familiar cousins to hydrogen bonds. They are defined as non-covalent interactions (NCI) between a halogen atom (X, acting as a Lewis acid, in accepting electrons) and a Lewis base D donating electrons; D….X-A vs D…H-A. They are superficially surprising, since both D and X look like electron rich species. In fact the electron distribution around X-X (A=X) is highly anisotropic, with the electron rich distribution (the "donor") being in a torus encircling the bond, and an electron deficient region (the "acceptor") lying along the axis of the bond.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: crystal structure search, D. Note, frequent commentator, Paul Schleyer
Posted in crystal_structure_mining, Interesting chemistry, reaction mechanism | No Comments »