Low Energy Records

Pick an empirical formula. Now, what's the most stable compound that fits it? Not an easy question, for sure, and it's the topic of this paper in Angewandte Chemie. Most chemists will immediately realize that the first problem is the sheer number of possibilities, and the second one is figuring out their energies. A nonscientist might think that this is the sort of thing that would have been worked out a long time ago, but that definitely isn't the case. Why think about these things? What is this “Guinness” molecule isomer search good for? Some astrochemists think in such terms when they look for molecules in interstellar space. A rule with exceptions says that the most stable isomers have a higher abundance (Astrophys. J.­ 2009, 696, L133), although kinetic control undoubtedly has a say in this. Pyrolysis or biotechnology processes, for example, in anaerobic biomass-to-fuel conversions, may be classified on the energy scale of their products. The fate of organic aerosols upon excitation with highly energetic radiation appears to be strongly influenced by such sequences because of ion-catalyzed chain reactions (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys.­ 2013, 15, 940). The magic of protein folding is tied to the most stable atomic arrangement, although one must keep in mind that this is a minimum-energy search with hardly any chemical-bond rearrangement. We should rather not think about what happens to our proteins in a global search for their minimum-energy structure, although the pept...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs