Neat grinding and solvent-drop grinding methods are found to be effective screening tools for indicating the potential for crystalline salt formation involving a given acid-base pair, as demonstrated with two model pharmaceuticals.

No abstract

This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/10987/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Strathprints administrator: strathprints@strath.ac.ukThe Strathprints institutional repository (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk) is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde research outputs. It has been developed to disseminate open access research outputs, expose data about those outputs, and enable the management and persistent access to Strathclyde's intellectual output. Abstract: The predictions of the crystal structure of 3-azabicyclo[3.3.1]nonane-2,4-dione submitted in the 2001 international blind test of crystal structure prediction (CSP2001) led to the conclusion that crystal structures containing an alternative hydrogen bonded dimer motif were energetically competitive with the known catemer-based structure. Here we report an extensive search for a dimer-based crystal structure. Search for a Predicted Hydrogen Bonding MotifUsing an automated polymorph screen a new catemer-based metastable polymorph (form 2) and two new catemer-based solvates were found, and concurrent thermal studies reproduced form 2 and identified a plastic phase (form 3), whose powder X-ray diffraction pattern was consistent with the cubic space group I23 (a ) 7.5856(1) Å). Computational studies on the monomer showed that the imide N-H was a weak hydrogen bond donor, rationalizing the occurrence of the plastic phase which involved the breaking of all hydrogen bonds, and modeling of small clusters showed that dimers could easily reorganize to give the catemer. FTIR spectra confirmed the weakness of the hydrogen bond, with the solute showing no selfassembly in solution. It is concluded that the weakness of the N-H donor, coupled with the globular shape of the molecule, allows unusually facile transformation between alternative hydrogen bonding motifs during aggregation and nucleation.