I have blogged before about the mechanism of this classical oxidation reaction. Here I further explore computed models, and whether they match the observed kinetic isotope effects (KIE) obtained using the natural-abundance method described in the previous post.
Posts Tagged ‘ATM’
Natural abundance kinetic isotope effects: mechanism of the Baeyer-Villiger reaction.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2015Tags:ATM, Baeyer–Villiger oxidation, Chemistry, Dipole, energy, energy gradient, Kinetic isotope effect, Physical organic chemistry
Posted in reaction mechanism | 4 Comments »
Mechanism of the Boekelheide rearrangement
Wednesday, June 26th, 2013A reader asked me about the mechanism of the reaction of 2-picoline N-oxide with acetic anhydride to give 2-acetoxymethylpyridine (the Boekelheide Rearrangement[1]). He wrote ” I don’t understand why the system should prefer to go via fragmentation-recombination (… the evidence being that oxygen labelling shows scrambling) when there is an easy concerted pathway available (… a [3,3]sigmatropic shift). Furthermore, is it possible for two pathways to co-exist?” Here is how computation might enlighten us.
References
- A. Massaro, A. Mordini, A. Mingardi, J. Klein, and D. Andreotti, "A New Sequential Intramolecular Cyclization Based on the Boekelheide Rearrangement", European Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol. 2011, pp. 271-279, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.201000936
Tags:ATM, CF 3 CO, CH 3 CO, extraneous product, free energy, free energy barrier, Interesting chemistry, pericyclic, recombination
Posted in reaction mechanism | 3 Comments »
Thalidomide. The role of water in the mechanism of its aqueous racemisation.
Saturday, November 10th, 2012Thalidomide is a chiral molecule, which was sold in the 1960s as a sedative in its (S,R)-racemic form. The tragedy was that the (S)-isomer was tetragenic, and only the (R) enantiomer acts as a sedative. What was not appreciated at the time is that interconversion of the (S)- and (R) forms takes place quite quickly in aqueous media. Nowadays, quantum modelling can provide good in-silico estimates of the (free) energy barriers for such processes, which in this case is a simple keto-enol tautomerism. In a recently published article[1], just such a simulation is reported. By involving two explicit water molecules in the transition state, an (~enthalpic) barrier of 27.7 kcal/mol was obtained. The simulation was conducted just with two water molecules acting as solvent, and without any additional continuum solvation applied. So I thought I would re-evaluate this result by computing it at the ωB97XD/6-311G(d,p)/SCRF=water level (a triple-ζ basis set rather than the double-ζ used before[1]), and employing a dispersion-corrected DFT method rather than B3LYP.
References
- C. Tian, P. Xiu, Y. Meng, W. Zhao, Z. Wang, and R. Zhou, "Enantiomerization Mechanism of Thalidomide and the Role of Water and Hydroxide Ions", Chemistry - A European Journal, vol. 18, pp. 14305-14313, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/chem.201202651
Tags:298 4.7, aqueous media, ATM, energy barrier, energy barriers, free energy, Historical, Interesting chemistry, Reaction Mechanism, simulation, zero-point-energy
Posted in Uncategorised | 1 Comment »