Subject: Re: Prediction of Chemical Reactivity

From: "Phil Hultin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 10:17:31 -0600

Whoa!  Predicting reactivity is one hell of a problem especially if you want
to cover such a wide range of systems.  There are many programs that can
help you to find reasonable structures for transition states, and more or
less plausible activation energies.  But to quantitatively predict relative
rates simply from the identities of reactant pairs is not trivial!  I don't
think anyone can do it in a meaningful way.

We are working on a "simple" problem related to case 1 below - nucleophilic
substitution of primary alkyl chlorides.  Believe me, it is consuming large
amounts of high powered computer time, and we still haven't convinced
referees that we are right in our explanation of the relative reactivities
(although I am sure that we are ;-) )!  You are not going to find this sort
of thing "off the shelf".

William Laidig Wrote:

>I have a colleague who needs software forpredicting the probability of a
aqueous
>chemical reaction occurring between a variety of reactive chemicals at
around
>pH7.  Specificly,
>   1)nucleophilic substitiution of halogenated compounds
>   2) Schiff base formaiton
>   3) addition-elimination of acids, esters, amides
>   4) nucleophilic adition of aldehydes and ketones
>   5) Michael addition of alpha,beta unsaturated compounds
>   6) addition by ring cleavage of epoxides
>   7) electrophilic substitiution of diazonium salts
>I am not up on current synthetic prediction program and would appreciate am
>pointers to current software, recommendations, etc.  I will summarize
responsews
>to the list

Dr. Philip G. Hultin
Associate Department Head and
Associate Professor of Chemistry
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2
(vox) 204-474-9814
(fax) 204-474-7608
mailto:[email-masked]
http://www.umanitoba.ca/chemistry/

---

From: "Michael D. Bartberger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 09:03:26 -0800 (PST)

You may wish to check the current status of the "CAMEO" program system, as
developed by the Jorgensen group at Yale.    Perhaps this might be helpful
to you.

Best regards,
-Mike

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Phil Hultin wrote:

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