Hydrogen bonding and electronegativity

So once again it's #RealTimeChem Week and to 'celebrate' we'll be taking a look at the relationship between hydrogen bond basicity and electronegativity in this blog post. The typical hydrogen bond is an interaction between an electronegative atom and a hydrogen atom that is covalently bonded to an another electronegative atom. We tend to think about hydrogen bonding as electrostatic in nature and we often use electrostatic models to describe the phenomenon. Let's take a look at hydrogen fluoride dimer which is probably the simplest hydrogen bonded system.

Fluorine is more electronegative than hydrogen which means that it tends to draw the electrons it shares with hydrogen towards itself. This gives fluorine a partial negative charge and hydrogen a partial positive charge. This simple electrostatic model suggests that a hydrogen bond will get stronger in response to increases in the electronegativity of either the acceptor atom or the atom to which the donor hydrogen is covalently bonded. 

Hydrogen bond strength can be quantified as the equilibrium constant for the association of a hydrogen bond donor with a hydrogen bond acceptor in a non-polar solvent. For example, pK_BHX can be used as a measure of hydrogen bond basicity where K_BHX is the equilibrium constant for association of the hydrogen bond acceptor compound (e.g. pyridine) with 4-fluorophenol in carbon tetrachloride.  Let's take a look at some pK_BHX values for three structurally prototypical  compounds that present nitrogen, oxygen or fluorine to a hydrogen bond donor. 

The trend is the complete opposite of what you might have expected on the basis of the simple electrostatic model for hydrogen fluoride dimer. However, this is not as weird as you might think because electronegativity tells us about distribution of charge between atoms but at hydrogen bonding distances the donor can 'sense' the distribution of charge within the acceptor atom. Electronegativity quantifies the extent to which an atom can function as an 'electron sink' and this is also related to how effectively the atom can 'hide' the resulting excess charge from the environment around it. Put another way, fluorine will appear to be really weird if you think of it as a large, negative partial atomic charge

This is a good place to wrap up and, if you're interested in this sort of thing, why not take a look at this article on prediction of hydrogen bond basicity from molecular electrostatic potential. My most up to date hydrogen bond basicity data set can be found in the supplemental information (check the zip file) for this article and that's where I got the figures for the table.

From schwefeläther to octanol

So in this blog post, written specially for #RealTimeChem week on an #OldTimeChem theme, I'll start ten years after the Kaiser's grandmother became Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  I first came across Ernst Friherr von Bibra while doing some literature work for an article on predicting alkane/water partition coefficients and learned that he was from an illustrious family of Franconian Prince-Bishops. Von Bibra certainly seems to have been a colorful character who is said to have fought no less than 49 duels as a young man. Presumably these were not the duels to the death that did for poor Galois and Pushkin but more like the München frat house duels that leave participants with the dueling scars that München Fräuleins find so irresistible.

So that's how I learned about von Bibra and it was his 1847 study with Harless 'Die Ergebnisse der Versuche über die Wirkung des Schwefeläthers' (The results of the experiments on the effect of the sulfuric ether) that we cited. Schwefeläther is simply diethyl ether and so named because in 1847 you needed to make it from ethanol and sulfuric acid. Von Bibra was a pioneer in the anesthesia field and proposed that anesthetics like ether exerted their effects by dissolving the fatty fraction of brain cells. Now it's easy in 2015 to scoff at this thinking but remember that in 1847 nobody knew about cell membranes or molecules and you couldn't just pick up the phone and expect the ether to arrive the next day. Put another way, if it was 1847 and I was in the laboratory (or kitchen?) gazing at a bowl of brains and a bottle of ether, I would probably have come to a similar conclusion.

What we know now is that anesthetics (and other drugs) dissolve IN lipids as opposed to dissolving THE lipids. Nobody in 1847 knew about partition coefficients and Walther Nernst didn't articulate his famous distribution law (Verteilung eines Stoffes zwischen zwei Lösungsmitteln und zwischen Lösungsmittel und Dampfraum. Z Phys Chem 8:110–139) until 1891 by which time the Kaiser had already handed Bismarck his P45. Within ten years Ernest Overton and Hans Meyer had shown incredible foresight in using amphibians as animal models and the concept of the cell membrane would soon be introduced.

Before moving on, let's take a look at the 'introduction to partition coefficients' graphic below in which the aqueous phase is marked by a the presence of fish (they're actually piranhas and have have graced my partition coefficient powerpoints since my first visit to Brazil in 2009). We would describe the compound on the left as lipophilic because its neutral form prefers the organic phase to water and, for now, I'm not going to be too specific about exactly what that organic phase is. The compound on the right prefers to be in the water so we describe it as hydrophilic.  The red molecule on the left represents an ionized form of the compound on the left and typically these don't particularly like to go into the organic phase (especially not without counter ions for company).  A compound that prefers to to be in the organic phase can still be drawn into the aqueous phase by increasing the extent to which it is ionized (e.g. by decreasing pH if the compound is basic).

  

Now I'd like to introduce Runar Collander (whom many of you will have heard of) and Calvin Golumbic (whom few of you will have heard of).  Let's first take a look at Golumbic's 1949 study of the effects of ionization on the partitioning of phenols between water and cyclohexane.  Please observe the responses to pH in Fig 1 in that article but also take a look at equation 5 which accounts for self-association in the organic phase and the discussion about how methyl group ortho the phenolic hydroxyl compromises the hydrogen bonding of that hydroxyl group and has observable effects on the partition coefficient.

Collander's study (The Partition of Organic Compounds Between Higher Alcohols and Water) explores how differences in the organic solvent affect partitioning behaviour of solutes.  Collander presented evidence for strong linear relationships between partition coefficients measured using different alcohols (see Fig 1 in his article) although he notes that compounds with two or more hydrophilic groups in their molecular structure tend to deviate from the trend. Now take a look at Fig 2 in Collander's study which shows a plot of octanol/water partition coefficients against their ether/water equivalents. Now the correlation doesn't look so strong although relationships within chemical families appear to be a lot better. In particular, amines appear to be more soluble in octanol than they are in ether and Collander attributes this to the greater acidity of octanol. 

When reading these articles from over sixty years ago, I'm struck by the way the authors ratioanalize their observations in physical terms.  Don't be misled by what we would regard as the obscure use of language (e.g. Collander's "double molecules"  and Golumbic's description of partition coefficients as "true") because the conceptual and linguistic basis of chemistry in 2015 is richer than it was when these pioneering studies were carried out.  How these pioneers would have viewed some of the more mindless metrics by which chemists of 2015 have become enslaved can only be speculated about.

So I'm almost done but one last character in this all-star cast has yet to make his entrance and that, of course, is Corwin Hansch. Most drug discovery scientists 'know' that octanol 'defines' lipophilicity and only a small minority actually question the suitability of octanol for this purpose or even ask how this situation came to be. In order to address the second question, let's take a look at what Hansch et al have to say in this 1963 article,

"We have chosen octanol and water as a model system to approximate the effect of step I on the growth reaction in much the same fashion as the classical work of Meyer and Overton rationalized the relative activities of various anesthetics. This assumption is expressed in 2 where P is the partition coefficient (octanol-water) of the auxin.

          A = f(P)                              (2)

Collander has shown that the partition coefficients for a given compound in two different solvent systems (e.g., ether-water, octanol-water) are related as in 3.

          log P1 = a log P2 + b        (3)

This would also indicate, as does the Meyer-Overton work, that it is not unreasonable to use the results from one set of solvents to predict results in a second set". 

Now if you take another look at Collander's article, you'll see that he only claims that a linear relationship exists between partition coefficients when the organic phase is an alcohol. Collander's Fig 2 seems to suggest that Hansch et al's equation 3 cannot be used to relate octanol/water and ether/water partition coefficients. Can Collander's study be used to justify what appears to be a rather arbitrary choice of octanol as a solvent for partition coefficient measurements? That question, I will leave to you, the reader but, if you're interested, let me point you towards a short talk that I did recently at Ripon College. 

See you next year at #RealTimeChem week and don't forget to take a look at Laura's nails which get my vote for highlight of the week.

Halogen bonding and the curious case of the poisoned dogs

In this blog post, written specially for #RealTimeChem week on an #OldTimeChem theme, I'm going to start in the current century and work back to just a couple of years after the Kaiser's grandmother became Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Readers might want to consider how history might have turned out differently had her eldest child succeeded her to the throne.

One can be forgiven for thinking that halogen bonding is a new phenomenon.  The term halogen bonding refers to attractive interactions between halogens and hydrogen bond acceptors which should be repulsive because hydrogen bond acceptors and halogens are electronegative and would therefore be expected to carry negative partial charges. Nevertheless halogens (other than fluorine) do seem to rather enjoy the company of hydrogen bond acceptors and molecular interaction 'catalogs' such as A Medicinal Chemist's Guide to Molecular Interactions and Molecular Recognition in Chemical and Biological Systems ensure that the medicinal chemist of 2015 is made aware of the importance of halogen bonding and of potential opportunities for exploiting them.

I was first made aware of halogen bonding in the mid 1990s through interactions with Zeneca colleagues at Jealotts Hill and, some time after that, The Nature and Geometry of Intermolecular Interactions between Halogens and Oxygen or Nitrogen was published with one of those colleagues (who had by then moved to CCDC) as a co-author.  A few years ago, I reproduced some of the analysis from that paper for a talk and here is one of the slides which shows how the closest contacts between the carbonyl oxygen and halogen are observed when the two atoms approach along along the axis defined by the halogen and the carbon atom to which it is bound.

If the halogen is bound to something that is sufficiently electron-withdrawing, the molecular electrostatic potential (MEP) on a circular patch on the van der Waals surface of the halogen becomes positive and sometimes this is described as a s-hole.  This article shows that of the s-hole is most pronounced for iodine and non-existent for fluorine, which is consistent with what X-ray crystal structures tell us about halogen bonding. I created a slightly different picture of the s-hole for my talk which shows MEP as a function of distance along two orthogonal directions of approach to the chlorine.  The significance of the  s-hole is that you doesn't actually have to invoke polarization to 'explain' halogen bonding even though it will always happen when atoms get up close and personal. 

When I first encountered halogen bonding, I remembered learning about the reaction of iodine with iodide anion as a schoolboy in Port-of-Spain in the 1970s. Iodine is not particularly water-soluble and this is a way to coax it into solution. That iodine forms complexes with Lewis bases has been known for many years and the Nantes group, better known for their extensive studies of hydrogen bond basicity, have used this to develop a halogen bond basicity scale based on this chemistry.

So in the spring of 2008 I found myself charged with doing a talk on halogens at EuroCUP (OpenEye European user group meeting) and halogen bonding was clearly going to be an important topic. To understand why I was doing this, we need to go back to the 2007 Computer-Aided Drug Design Gordon Conference and specifically the election of the vice chair for the 2009 conference. My good friend Anthony Nicholls was one of the nominees and in his candidacy speech said that he was going to have a session on halogens.  Although Ant didn't win that election, this is by far the most lucid and sensible suggestion that I've heard in a GRC candidacy speech. Needless to say the session on halogens happened in Strasbourg at EuroCUP (the morning after the conference dinner in a winery) and it was on the bus ride to that dinner that I had this conversation with my favorite Austro-Hungarian:

 "Onkel Hugo, where are you from in Germany?   
I am from AUSTRIA!   
Is that in Bavaria?"

While preparing the harangue, I decided to follow the iodine/iodide trail to see how far back it led and I was thrilled to encounter The Periodides by Albert B Prescott, writing in 1895, in which it was noted that, 

"In I839 Bouchardat, a medical writer in Paris, recounts that, when dogs were being surreptitiously poisoned with strychnine in Paris, and an antidote was asked for, first Guibourt recommended powdered galls, and then Donne advised iodine tincture, whereupon Bouchardat himself, approving the use of iodine, said they should use it in potassium iodide solution."

Thirty one years after the nefarious activities of the notorious Parisian dog poisoners  a sudden influx of Prussian visitors demonstrated the inadequacy of Strasbourg's supply of sunbeds and and I probably should now let you take a look at that infamous EuroCUP2008 harangue.