Full conformational space of cinchonine and cinchonidine has been investigated by means of statistical analysis of quantum chemical molecular dynamics simulations. Recently developed procedure comprising principal component analysis of molecular dynamics trajectories was applied on cinchonine and cinchonidine as well as on their protonated and methylated quaternary derivatives. The method for full conformational analysis includes Cartesian coordinates sampling through quantum chemical molecular dynamics simulations, reduction of dimensionality by principal component analysis, determination of probability distributions in a reduced space of Cartesian coordinates and search for all the strict extrema points in probability distribution functions. In order to gain crucial insight in the understanding of chirality induction of these alkaloids, comparison of the determined conformational spaces of pseudo-enantiomers has been made. It was shown that protonation of the quinuclidine nitrogen atom stabilizes the conformers with the intramolecular 1N–H∙∙∙9O hydrogen bond whereas methylation on the same position results in the reduction of the domain of internal coordinates responsible for the conformational space.

A novel heavy metal-free and safe synthetic methodology enabling one-step conversion of ketones into corresponding 4,5,6,7-tetrafluorobenzofurans (F 4 BFs) has been developed. The presented approach has numerous advantageous qualities, including utilization of readily available substrates, broad scope, scalability, and good reaction yields. Importantly, some of the benzofurans prepared by this method were heretofore inaccessible by any other known transformation. Importantly, furo[2,3-b]pyrazines and heretofore unexplored difuro[2,3-c:3',2'-e]pyridazine can be prepared using this strategy. Spectroscopic studies reveal that for simple systems, absorption and fluorescence maxima fall within the UV spectral range, while π-electron system expansion red-shifts both spectra. Moreover, the good fluorescence quantum yields observed in solution, up to 96 %, are also maintained in the solid state. Experimental results are supported by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The presented methodology, combined with the spectroscopic characteristics, suggest the possibility of using F 4 BFs in the optoelectronic industry (i. e., organic light emitting devices (OLED), organic field-effect transistors (OFET), organic photovoltaics (OPV)) as inexpensive and readily available emissive or semiconductor materials.