The α-H acidity is an important chemical property of ketones that has attracted much research interest. Theoretical prediction of pKa for ketone α-H is significant. In this work, we theoretically studied the nuclear shielding of various α-Hs in a set of ketones and that of the corresponding enolic hydroxyl Hs in tautomeric enol forms. It has been demonstrated through linear regression analyses that the pKa values of these ketones correlate with both sets of the calculated nuclear shielding values. The correlation coefficient R2 of the linear correlation relationship is 0.90. The present work has provided a new approach to computationally evaluating the acidity of α-Hs in ketones, enabling us to semi-empirically predict the ketone α-H acidity from the calculated nuclear shielding values. Graphical AbstractExperimental pKa values in DMSO vs predicted pKa values calculated from 1H nuclear shielding for the hydroxyl hydrogens in the enol forms and for the α-Hs in the keto forms. The surrounding solvent effects were modelled by keto/enol-DMSO clusters and SMD solvent models.
Keywords: Enol; Ketone; Linear correlation; Nuclear shielding; pK a.