Posts Tagged ‘computational chemistry’

An Ambimodal Trispericyclic Transition State: the effect of solvation?

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

Ken Houk’s group has recently published this study of cycloaddition reactions, using a combination of classical transition state location followed by molecular dynamics trajectory calculations,[1] and to which Steve Bachrach’s blog alerted me. The reaction struck me as being quite polar (with cyano groups) and so I took a look at the article to see what both the original[2] experimental conditions were and how the new simulations compared. The reaction itself is shown below.

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References

  1. X. Xue, C.S. Jamieson, M. Garcia-Borràs, X. Dong, Z. Yang, and K.N. Houk, "Ambimodal Trispericyclic Transition State and Dynamic Control of Periselectivity", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 141, pp. 1217-1221, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.8b12674
  2. C.Y. Liu, and S.T. Ding, "Cycloadditions of electron-deficient 8,8-disubstituted heptafulvenes to electron-rich 6,6-disubstituted fulvenes", The Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol. 57, pp. 4539-4544, 1992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jo00042a039

Smoke and mirrors. All is not what it seems with this Sn2 reaction!

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

Previously, I explored the Graham reaction to form a diazirine. The second phase of the reaction involved an Sn2′ displacement of N-Cl forming C-Cl. Here I ask how facile the simpler displacement of C-Cl by another chlorine might be and whether the mechanism is Sn2 or the alternative Sn1. The reason for posing this question is that as an Sn1 reaction, simply ionizing off the chlorine to form a diazacyclopropenium cation might be a very easy process. Why? Because the resulting cation is analogous to the cyclopropenium cation, famously proposed by Breslow as the first example of a 4n+2 aromatic ring for which the value of n is zero and not 1 as for benzene.[1] Another example of a famous “Sn1” reaction is the solvolysis of t-butyl chloride to form the very stable tertiary carbocation and chloride anion (except in fact that it is not an Sn1 reaction but an Sn2 one!)

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References

  1. R. Breslow, "SYNTHESIS OF THE s-TRIPHENYLCYCLOPROPENYL CATION", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 79, pp. 5318-5318, 1957. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja01576a067

Reaction coordinates vs Dynamic trajectories as illustrated by an example reaction mechanism.

Monday, March 20th, 2017

The example a few posts back of how methane might invert its configuration by transposing two hydrogen atoms illustrated the reaction mechanism by locating a transition state and following it down in energy using an intrinsic reaction coordinate (IRC). Here I explore an alternative method based instead on computing a molecular dynamics trajectory (MD).

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The 2016 Bradley-Mason prize for open chemistry.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2016

Peter Murray-Rust and I are delighted to announce that the 2016 award of the Bradley-Mason prize for open chemistry goes to Jan Szopinski (UG) and Clyde Fare (PG).

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The chemical Web at 22 and where it might go.

Wednesday, August 19th, 2015

This post is prompted by the appearance of a retrospective special issue of C&E news, with what appears to be its very own Website: internet.cenmag.org. It contains articles and interviews with many interesting people, along with several variations on the historical (albeit rather USA-centric) perspectives and a time-line covers many of the key innovations (again, from a USA-perspective). Some subjects are covered in greater depth, including computational chemistry. The periodic table too gets coverage, but surprisingly that is not of Mark Winter’s WebElements, which carries the impressive 1993-2015 continuous timeline (hence 22 in the title!).  

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Digital repositories. An update.

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

I blogged about this two years ago and thought a brief update might be in order now. To support the discussions here, I often perform calculations, and most of these are then deposited into a DSpace digital repository, along with metadata. Anyone wishing to have the full details of any calculation can retrieve these from the repository. Now in 2012, such repositories are more important than ever. 

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Origins of the Regioselectivity of Cyclopropylcarbinyl Ring Opening Reactions.

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Twenty years are acknowledged to be a long time in Internet/Web terms. In the early days (in 1994), it was a taken that the passage of 1 Web day in the Internet time-warp was ~≡ 7 for the rest of the world (the same factor as applied to the lives of canines). This temporal warping can also be said to apply to computational chemistry. I previously revisited some computational work done in 1992, and here I rediscover another investigation from that year[1] and that era. The aim in this post is to compare not only how the presentation of the results has changed, but how the computational models have as well.

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References

  1. R.A. Batey, P. Grice, J.D. Harling, W.B. Motherwell, and H.S. Rzepa, "Origins of the regioselectivity of cyclopropylcarbinyl ring opening reactions in bicyclo [n.1.0] systems", Journal of the Chemical Society, Chemical Communications, pp. 942, 1992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C39920000942

The Dieneone-phenol controversies.

Monday, April 30th, 2012

During the 1960s, a holy grail of synthetic chemists was to devise an efficient route to steroids. R. B. Woodward was one the chemists who undertook this challenge, starting from compounds known as dienones (e.g. 1) and their mysterious conversion to phenols (e.g. 2 or 3) under acidic conditions. This was also the golden era of mechanistic exploration, which coupled with an abundance of radioactive isotopes from the war effort had ignited the great dienone-phenol debates of that time (now largely forgotten). In a classic recording from the late 1970s, Woodward muses how chemistry had changed since he started in the early 1940s. In particular he notes how crystallography had revolutionised the reliability and speed of molecular structure determination. Here I speculate what he might have made of modern computational chemistry, and in particular whether it might cast new light on those mechanistic controversies of the past.

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Confirming the Fischer convention as a structurally correct representation of absolute configuration.

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

I wrote in an earlier post how Pauling’s Nobel prize-winning suggestion in February 1951 of a (left-handed) α-helical structure for proteins[1] 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[2] 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[3] 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[2] result, their helix too might have turned out a left-handed one!

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References

  1. L. Pauling, R.B. Corey, and H.R. Branson, "The structure of proteins: Two hydrogen-bonded helical configurations of the polypeptide chain", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 37, pp. 205-211, 1951. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.37.4.205
  2. J.M. BIJVOET, A.F. PEERDEMAN, and A.J. van BOMMEL, "Determination of the Absolute Configuration of Optically Active Compounds by Means of X-Rays", Nature, vol. 168, pp. 271-272, 1951. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/168271a0
  3. W.W. Wood, W. Fickett, and J.G. Kirkwood, "The Absolute Configuration of Optically Active Molecules", The Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 20, pp. 561-568, 1952. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1700491

Computers 1967-2011: a personal perspective. Part 4. Moore’s Law and Molecules.

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the evolution of computing hardware, and it is often interpreted in terms of processing speed. Here I chart this rise in terms of the size of computable molecules. By computable I mean specifically how long it takes to predict the geometry of a given molecule using a quantum mechanical procedure.

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