Determination of the absolute configurations of chiral organometallic complexes via density functional theory calculations of their vibrational circular dichroism spectra: The chiral chromium tricarbonyl complex of N-pivaloyl-tetrahydroquinoline

Absolute Configurations of Synthetic Molecular Scaffolds from Vibrational CD Spectroscopy

Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectroscopy is one of the most powerful techniques for the determination of absolute configurations (AC), as it does not require any specific UV/vis chromophores, no chemical derivatization, and no growth of suitable crystals. In the past decade, it has become increasingly recognized by chemists from various fields of synthetic chemistry such as total synthesis and drug discovery as well as from developers of asymmetric catalysts. This perspective article gives an overview about the most important experimental aspects of a VCD-based AC determination and explains the theoretical analysis. The comparison of experimental and computational spectra that leads to the final conclusion about the AC of the target molecules is described. In addition, the review summarizes unique VCD studies carried out in the period 2008-2018 that focus on the determination of unknown ACs of new compounds, which were obtained in its enantiopure form either through direct asymmetric synthesis or chiral chromatography.

Vibrational circular dichroism under the quantum magnifying glass: from the electronic flow to the spectroscopic observable

A chemically intuitive method to analyse and interpret vibrational circular dichroism spectra based on the vibrational transition current density.

Estimation of optical rotation of γ-alkylidenebutenolide, cyclopropylamine, cyclopropyl-methanol and cyclopropenone based compounds by a Density Functional Theory (DFT) approach

Computing the optical rotation of organic molecules can be a real challenge, and various theoretical approaches have been developed in this regard. A benchmark study of optical rotation of various classes of compounds was carried out by Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods. The aim of the present research study was to find out the best-suited functional and basis set to estimate the optical rotations of selected compounds with respect to experimental literature values. Six DFT functional LSDA, BVP86, CAM-B3LYP, B3PW91, and PBE were applied on 22 different compounds. Furthermore, six different basis sets, i.e., 3-21G, 6-31G, aug-cc-pVDZ, aug-cc-pVTZ, DGDZVP, and DGDZVP2 were also applied with the best-suited functional B3LYP. After rigorous effort, it can be safely said that the best combination of functional and basis set is B3LYP/aug-cc-pVTZ for the estimation of optical rotation for selected compounds.

Comparison of vibrational circular dichroism instruments: development of a new dispersive VCD

A dispersive vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) instrument has been designed and optimized for the measurement of mid-infrared (MIR) bands such as the amide I and amide II vibrational modes of peptides and proteins. The major design considerations were to construct a compact VCD instrument for biological molecules, to increase signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, to simultaneously collect and digitize the sample transmission and polarization modulation signals, and to digitally ratio them to yield a VCD spectrum. These were realized by assembling new components using design factors adapted from previous VCD instruments. A collection of spectra for peptides and proteins having different dominant secondary structures (alpha-helix, beta-sheet, and random coil) measured for identical samples under the same conditions showed that the new instrument had substantially improved S/N as compared with our previous dispersive VCD instrument. These instruments both provide protein VCD for the amide I that are comparable to or somewhat better than those measurable with commercial Fourier transform (FT) VCD instruments if just the amide I band in the spectra is obtained at modest resolution (8 cm(-1)) with the same total data collection time on each type of instrument.