Toronto, March 2004

A review of structures which have been elucidated to date using ACD/Structure Elucidator

Mikhail Elyashberg, Kirill Blinov and Antony Williams

An excerpt from...

The Results of Challenging ACD/Structure Elucidator

In laboratories around the world scientists apply their experience, knowledge and instincts to the elucidation of chemical structures. Every year hundreds of thousands of analyses are performed where the output is either an elucidated structure but more commonly a verified structure. The distinction between elucidation and verification is whereby a scientist confirms consistency with a hypothetical chemical structure or fully elucidates a chemical structure using an appropriate array of scientific data. In both cases ACD/Labs offers solutions to support these efforts by providing a number of multinuclear NMR prediction tools and add-on content databases to support structure verification and ACD/Structure Elucidator to facilitate computer assisted structure elucidation (CASE).

ACD/Structure Elucidator has been developed over the past 5 years with input from NMR scientists around the world. There has been no shortage of challenging problems which have pushed the application to its limits and demanded consistent enhancement to the algorithms and interface to allow ACD/Structure Elucidator to become the definitive commercial CASE system. During the development of this system we have tested its limits using literature data and helped elucidate complete unknowns which had, until now, remained unsolved. ACD/Structure Elucidator has allowed the elucidation of a chemical structure that previously had challenged a skilled NMR spectroscopist for over a decade. The elucidation of TC-6 is discussed in detail in the publication Magn. Reson. Chem., 41, 577-584 (2003). This particular publication identifies in detail how CASE approaches supports a symbiotic relationship between an NMR spectroscopist and the power of computational approaches. This is the first example, that we are aware of, where a CASE system was able to elucidate a structure which could not be solved by manual interrogation.

In 2001 ACD/Labs made available online the ACD/Structure Elucidator Challenge. This allowed chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions worldwide to submit their elucidation challenges to us directly. The process involved submitting their spectral data and having us elucidate the structure blindly, without knowing what the final structure was. Over 50 challenges have been submitted and solved successively and further details are reviewed at the Elucidator Challenge page.

This document provides an overview of some of the more challenging elucidations performed using literature data as well as, by inclusion of reference to perr-reviewed publications, a review of a number of elucidations for complete unknowns. A number of scientific publications have resulted from this work and these are listed below for further reference. Many are available online for your perusal.

Successful Structures Elucidated by ACD/Structure Elucidator

This section will indicate the level of complexity and structural diversity which has been resolved using ACD/Structure Elucidator. We continue to challenge our software using new data published in the literature and using those challenges submitted to http://www.acdlabs.com/feedback/chaleluc.html. Some of these data will be listed below. We continue to publish the results of some of the collaborations we have with NMR spectroscopists around the world and these are available at http://www.acdlabs.com/products/spec_lab/complex_tasks/str_elucidator/reviews.html.

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