The previous post looked at anomeric effects set up on centres such as B, Si or P, and involving two oxygen groups attached to these atoms.
The anomeric effect occurs at 4-coordinate (sp 3 ) carbon centres carrying two oxygen substituents and involves an alignment of a lone electron pair on one oxygen with the adjacent C-O σ*-bond of the other oxygen. Here I explore whether other centres can exhibit the phenomenon.
I previously used data mining of crystal structures to explore the directing influence of substituents on aromatic and heteroaromatic rings. Here I explore, quite literally, a different angle to the hydrogen bonding interactions between a benzene ring and OH or NH groups. I start by defining a benzene ring with a centroid.
This is a follow-up to the post on exploring the directing influence of (electron donating) substituents on benzene[cite]10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00346[/cite] with the focus on heteroaromatic rings such indoles, pyrroles and group 16 analogues (furans, thiophenes etc). The search query is shown above (and is available here[cite]10.14469/hpc/665[/cite]). As before, the distance is compared from an electrophile, modelled as
In this post, I pondered upon the C=O infra-red spectroscopic properties of esters, and showed three possible electronic influences: The red (and blue) arrows imply the C-O bond might shorten and the C=O bond would lengthen; the green the reverse. So time for a search of the crystal structure database as a reality check.
Previously, I looked at the historic origins of the so-called π-complex theory of metal-alkene complexes. Here I follow this up with some data mining of the crystal structure database for such structures. Alkene-metal "π-complexes" have what might be called a representational problem; they do not happily fit into the standard Lewis model of using lines connecting atoms to represent electron pairs.
A while ago, I explored how the 3-coordinate halogen compound ClF 3 is conventionally analyzed using VSEPR (valence shell electron pair repulsion theory). Here I (belatedly) look at other such tri-coordinate halogen compounds using known structures gleaned from the crystal structure database (CSD). The search query specifies 7A as the central atom, defined with just three bonded (non-metallic) atoms.
The title might give it away; this is my 500th blog post, the first having come some eight years ago. Very little online activity nowadays is excluded from measurement and so it is no surprise that this blog and another of my "other" scholarly endeavours, viz publishing in traditional journals, attract such "metrics" or statistics.
This is a follow-up to one aspect of the previous two posts dealing with nucleophilic substitution reactions at silicon. Here I look at the geometries of 5-coordinate compounds containing as a central atom 4A = Si, Ge, Sn, Pb and of the specific formula C 3 4AO 2 with a trigonal bipyramidal geometry.
In the previous post, I explored the mechanism for nucleophilic substitution at a silicon centre proceeding via retention of configuration involving a Berry-like pseudorotation. Here I probe an alternative route involving inversion of configuration at the Si centre.
The substitution of a nucleofuge (a good leaving group) by a nucleophile at a carbon centre occurs with inversion of configuration at the carbon, the mechanism being known by the term S N 2 (a story I have also told in this post). Such displacement at silicon famously proceeds by a quite different mechanism, which I here quantify with some calculations.
