Stereoelectronic and Dynamical Effects Dictate Nitrogen Inversion during Valence Isomerism in Benzene Imine

Benzene imine (1) ⇌ 1H-azepine (2) isomerization occurs through sequential valence and endo–exo isomerism. Quantum chemical and quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) simulations reveal the coupled reaction pathway ‒ ring-expansion followed by...

Can an Intermediate Rate of Nitrogen Inversion Affect Drug Efficacy?

Nitrogen-inversion rates and diffusion coefficients were measured using 1H NMR for 14 drug-like molecules. The slow nitrogen-inversion rates interconverting the enantiomers of these molecules lay within a postulated intermediate range in terms of their ability to bind to proteins bounded by diffusion constraints, potentially affecting the availability, hence efficacy, of these compounds if they were utilized as drugs. The postulated intermediate range is based on a capture-volume concept, whereby the nitrogen inversion during the time a ligand takes to pass through a volume surrounding the protein binding site, as calculated by the diffusion rate, determines if it will influence ligand binding to the protein. In the systems examined here, the measured nitrogen-inversion rates and the times required to traverse the capture volume differed by a few orders of magnitude. Potentially more consequential are intermediate nitrogen-inversion rates in epimeric cases—since the energies of the interconverting species are unequal, a heavy bias against the eutomer might occur. The implications of an intermediate nitrogen-inversion rate are significant for in silico drug design, drug efficacy, molecular modeling of drug–protein binding, pharmacokinetics, drug enantiomer evaluation, etc. Due consideration of the process should thus be taken into account for drug development directions and in vitro evaluation.

The interrelation between the structural, electronic and energy parameters of nitrogen inversion in ammonia derivatives

The structural, electronic and energy parameters in the ground and transition states of inversion of the amines H2NXHn (XHn=CH3, NH2, OH, F, SiH3, PH2, SH, and Cl) have been calculated by using DFT (PBE96/def2-tzvpp) method. It was established that the increase of electronegativity of the substituents (the X atoms within the same period) leads to stabilization of the ground and transition states of the molecules. The increase in the inversion barriers is due to relative stabilization of the ground states, but not due to relative destabilization of the transition states. The inversion barriers rise with a decrease in conformational energies of the substituents, sums of valence angles at the nitrogen atoms, negative charges on them, energies of the nitrogen lone pairs and with an increase in s-character and population of the nitrogen lone pairs and difference between the energies of the nitrogen lone pairs in the ground and transition states. The main parameters that allow predicting the change of the nitrogen inversion barriers, independently of the type or volume of the XHn substituent, are s-character of the nitrogen lone pairs and difference between the energies of the nitrogen lone pairs. In all other cases, the correlations were found only for the amines containing the elements of the same period at the nitrogen atom. All structural and electronic parameters of amines containing the Х atoms from the second period are more sensitive to the changes of the ХНn substituents than the parameters of amines containing the Х atoms from the third period.

Control of Dynamic sp3-C Stereochemistry

Stereogenic sp3-hybridized carbon centres are fundamental building blocks of chiral molecules. Unlike dynamic stereogenic motifs, such as sp3-nitrogen centres or atropisomeric biaryls, sp3-carbon centres are usually fixed, requiring intermolecular reactions to undergo configurational change. Here, we report the internal enantiomerization of fluxional carbon cages and the consequences of their adaptive configurations for the transmission of stereochemical information. The sp3-carbon stereochemistry of the rigid tricyclic cages is inverted through strain-assisted Cope rearrangements, emulating the low-barrier configurational dynamics typical for sp3 nitrogen inversion or conformational isomerism. This dynamic enantiomerization can be stopped, restarted, or slowed by external reagents, while the configuration of the cage is controlled by neighbouring, fixed stereogenic centres. As part of a phosphoramidite–olefin ligand, the fluxional cage acts as a conduit to transmit stereochemical information from the ligand while also transferring its dynamic properties to chiral-at-metal coordination environments, influencing catalysis and ligand exchange energetics.

Switched reaction specificity in polyesterases towards amide bond hydrolysis by enzyme engineering

The constitution of a water network for the nitrogen inversion mechanism by H-bonding can increase amide-containing substrate acceptance of polyesterases.