A Benefit of Using the IDSCRF- over UFF-Radii Cavities and Why Joint Correlations of NMR Chemical Shifts Can Be Advantageous: Condensed Pyridines as an IEF-PCM/GIAO/DFT Case Study

J Phys Chem A. 2016 Dec 8;120(48):9519-9528. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpca.6b10457. Epub 2016 Nov 23.

Abstract

Herein, an advantage of the use of IDSCRF- over UFF-radii-based solute cavities in GIAO/DFT calculations is presented for the 13C and especially 15N NMR chemical shifts made for several bicyclic aromatic nitrogen heterocycles in CDCl3 solution treated within the classical IEF-PCM solvation scheme. Successful application of the IDSCRF-radii in the non 1:1 joint multinuclear 1H/13C and particularly 1H/13C/15N correlations of the measured δH,C(,N) values to those obtained theoretically is also documented for a series of test systems (-268 ≤ δN ≤ -72 ppm). The experimentally yet unknown δN's were found in this way for the title compounds via a trinuclear eq 1 determined for an optimally chosen value of the multiplication factor of initial raw δH data (mH = 10). Such a simultaneous analysis of the δH,C(,N) data is proposed as a novel method to study the solution structure of the other similar conformationally homogeneous (bio)organic compounds. The issue of small spurious imaginary vibrational frequencies computed for a few molecular systems using the Gaussian 09 default UFF-radii is briefly considered as well.