Developing Comprehensive Computational Parameter Sets To Describe the Performance of Pyridine-Oxazoline and Related Ligands

The applicability of computational descriptors extracted from metal pyridine-oxazoline complexes to relate both site and enantioselectivity to structural diversity was investigated. A group of computationally derived features (e.g., metal NBO charges, steric descriptors, torsion angles) were acquired for a library of pyridine-oxazoline ligands. Correlation studies were employed to examine steric/electronic features described by each descriptor, followed by application of the said descriptors in modeling the results of two reaction types, the site-selective redox-relay Heck reaction and the enantioselective Carroll rearrangement, affording simple, well-validated models. Through experimental validation and extrapolation, parameters derived from ground state metal complexes were found to be advantageous over those from the free ligand.