In March, I posted from the ACS meeting in San Diego on the topic of Research data: Managing spectroscopy-NMR, and noted a talk by MestreLab Research on how a tool called Mpublish in the forthcoming release of their NMR analysis software Mestrenova could help. With that release now out, the opportunity arose to test the system.
Posts Tagged ‘spectroscopy’
Research data: Managing spectroscopy-NMR.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2016At the ACS conference, I have attended many talks these last four days, but one made some “connections” which intrigued me. I tell its story (or a part of it) here.
Chiroptical spectroscopy of the natural product Steganone.
Tuesday, February 10th, 2015Steganone is an unusual natural product, known for about 40 years now. The assignment of its absolute configurations makes for an interesting, on occasion rather confusing, and perhaps not entirely atypical story. I will start with the modern accepted stereochemical structure of this molecule, which comes in the form of two separately isolable atropisomers.
The first reported synthesis of this system in 1977 was racemic, and no stereochemistry is shown in the article (structure 2).[cite]10.1039/P19770001674[/cite] Three years later an “Asymmetric total synthesis of (-)steganone and revision of its absolute configuration” shows how the then accepted configuration (structure 1 in this article) needs to be revised to the enantiomer shown as structure 12 in the article[cite]10.1016/S0040-4039(00)78586-8[/cite] and matching the above representation. The system has continued to attract interest ever since[cite]10.1039/P19820000521[/cite],[cite]10.1039/A900743A[/cite],[cite]10.1039/C39950001943[/cite],[cite]10.1002/ejoc.201402761[/cite], not least because of the presence of axial chirality in the form of atropisomerism. Thus early on it was shown that the alternative atropisomer, the (aS,R,R) configuration initially emerges out of several syntheses, and has to be converted to the (aR,R,R) configuration by heating[cite]10.1039/P19820000521[/cite]. One could easily be fooled by such isomerism!
Blasts from the past. A personal Web presence: 1993-1996.
Saturday, November 1st, 2014Egon 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!
Why is the carbonyl IR stretch in an ester higher than in a ketone?
Thursday, February 28th, 2013Infra-red spectroscopy of molecules was introduced 110 years ago by Coblentz[cite]10.1103/PhysRevSeriesI.20.273[/cite] as the first functional group spectroscopic method (” The structure of the compound has a great influence on the absorption spectra. In many cases it seems as though certain bonds are due to certain groups.“). It hangs on in laboratories to this day as a rapid and occasionally valuable diagnostic tool, taking just minutes to measure. Its modern utility rests on detecting common functional groups, mostly based around identifying the nature of double or triple bonds, and to a lesser extent in differentiating between different kinds of C-H stretches[cite]10.1002/chem.201200547[/cite] (and of course OH and NH). One common use is to identify the environment of carbonyl groups, C=O. These tend to come in the form of aldehydes and ketones, esters, amides, acyl halides, anhydrides and carbonyls which are part of small rings. The analysis is performed by assigning the value of the C=O stretching wavenumber to a particular range characteristic of each type of compound. Thus ketones are said to inhabit the range of ~1715-1740 cm-1 and simple esters come at ~1740-1760 cm-1, some 20-30 cm-1 higher. Here I try to analyse how this difference arises.
A golden age for (computational) spectroscopy.
Monday, April 2nd, 2012I mentioned in my last post an unjustly neglected paper from that golden age of 1951-1953 by Kirkwood and co. They had shown that Fischer’s famous guess for the absolute configurations of organic chiral molecules was correct. The two molecules used to infer this are shown below.
Confirming the Fischer convention as a structurally correct representation of absolute configuration.
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012I wrote in an earlier post how Pauling’s Nobel prize-winning suggestion in February 1951 of a (left-handed) α-helical structure for proteins[cite]10.1073/pnas.37.4.205[/cite] was based on the wrong absolute configuration of the amino acids (hence his helix should really have been the right-handed enantiomer). This was most famously established a few months later by Bijvoet’s[cite]10.1038/168271a0[/cite] definitive crystallographic determination of the absolute configuration of rubidium tartrate, published on August 18th, 1951 (there is no received date, but a preliminary communication of this result was made in April 1950). Well, a colleague (thanks Chris!) just wandered into my office and he drew my attention to an article by John Kirkwood[cite]10.1063/1.1700491[/cite] published in April 1952, but received July 20, 1951,‡ carrying the assertion “The Fischer convention is confirmed as a structurally correct representation of absolute configuration“, and based on the two compounds 2,3-epoxybutane and 1,2-dichloropropane. Neither Bijvoet nor Kirkwood seem aware of the other’s work, which was based on crystallography for the first, and quantum computation for the second. Over the years, the first result has become the more famous, perhaps because Bijvoet’s result was mentioned early on by Watson and Crick in their own very famous 1953 publication of the helical structure of DNA. They do not mention Kirkwood’s result. Had they not been familiar with Bijvoet’s[cite]10.1038/168271a0[/cite] result, their helix too might have turned out a left-handed one!
Secrets of a university tutor: tetrahedral intermediates.
Sunday, January 8th, 2012The tetrahedral intermediate is one of those iconic species on which the foundation of reaction mechanism in organic chemistry is built. It refers to a (normally undetected and hence merely inferred) species formed initially when a nucleophilic reagent attacks a carbonyl compound. Its importance to understanding the activity of enzymes cannot be overstated. An example of this genre is shown below, in which a thiol reacts with an acyl cyanide to form the species ringed in green.
A lab in a backpack
Friday, April 3rd, 2009We recently developed a new computational chemistry practical laboratory here at Imperial College. I gave a talk about it at the recent ACS meeting in Salt Lake City. If you want to see the details of the lab, do go here. The talk itself contains further links and examples. Perhaps here I can quote only the final remark, namely that computational chemistry can now provide chemical accuracy for many problems, including spectroscopy and mechanism, and that the basic tools for doing it can easily be carried around in a backpack! Or, perhaps in the not to distant future, an iPhone!