A theoretical study of the hydrolysis mechanism of A-234 [EtO–P(O)(F)–NC(Me)–N(Et)2]; the suspected novichok agent in the Skripal attack.

We have computationally studied the bimolecular nucleophilic substitution (SN2) reactions of MnNH2(n−1) + CH3Cl (M+ = Li+, Na+, K+, and MgCl+; n = 0, 1) in the gas phase and in tetrahydrofuran solution at OLYP/6‐31++G(d,p) using polarizable continuum model implicit solvation. We wish to explore and understand the effect of the metal counterion M+ and of solvation on the reaction profile and the stereochemical preference, that is, backside (SN2‐b) versus frontside attack (SN2‐f). The results were compared to the corresponding ion‐pair SN2 reactions involving F− and OH− nucleophiles. Our analyses with an extended activation strain model of chemical reactivity uncover and explain various trends in SN2 reactivity along the nucleophiles F−, OH−, and , including solvent and counterion effects. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The distortion/interaction-activation strain model (D/I-ASM), a fragment analysis method, is applied to study the structure-reactivity relationship in reactions. The application of D/I-ASM involves the generation of input files for points along a reaction profile, submission of input files to a quantum software package, processing of parameters from the resulting output files and generation of graphical plots. The ExcelAutomat tool (Laloo et al., J. Comput. Aided Mol. Des. 2017, 31, 667) provides a framework and library in Visual Basic for Application programming language to process such files. New routines were written in ExcelAutomat 1.3 to facilitate processing of files for D/I-ASM. The worksheet "ASM" was included where initial parameters needed can be defined. The routines for D/I-ASM were tested successfully on bimolecular nucleophilic substitution, cycloaddition, and barrierless reactions. The automation of fragment analysis by ExcelAutomat 1.3 is compatible with Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc. The extensible tool processes files from Gaussian and GAMESS-US packages.

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Computational methods were used to analyse the interactions around the metal centres in three transition metal (TM) complexes for which the X-ray data are available. We were particularly interested in understanding the metal–metal interactions. We used concepts of bond order, natural population, quantum theory of atom in molecules, electron localisation functions (ELFs) and non-covalent interactions (NCIs). Our results indicate that these tools can be used effectively to help in having insights into the bonding of TM complexes.