New insights into steric and electronic effects in a series of phosphine ligands from the perspective of local quantum similarity using the Fukui function

Substituent effects on the stability, physicochemical properties and chemical reactivity of nitroimidazole derivatives with potential antiparasitic effect: a computational study

Neglected tropical diseases caused by parasitic pathogens have caused an increase in research interest in drug discovery.

Analyzing the substitution effect on the CoMFA results within the framework of density functional theory (DFT)

Though QSAR was originally developed in the context of physical organic chemistry, it has been applied very extensively to chemicals (drugs) which act on biological systems, in this idea one of the most important QSAR methods is the 3D QSAR model. However, due to the complexity of understanding the results it is necessary to postulate new methodologies to highlight their physical-chemical meaning. In this sense, this work postulates new insights to understand the CoMFA results using molecular quantum similarity and chemical reactivity descriptors within the framework of density functional theory. To obtain these insights a simple theoretical scheme involving quantum similarity (overlap, coulomb operators, their euclidean distances) and chemical reactivity descriptors such as chemical potential (μ), hardness (ɳ), softness (S), electrophilicity (ω), and the Fukui functions, was used to understand the substitution effect. In this sense, this methodology can be applied to analyze the biological activity and the stabilization process in the non-covalent interactions on a particular molecular set taking a reference compound.