Solid-State Chemistry and Polymorphism of the Nucleobase Adenine

Abstract

The nucleobase adenine plays a pivotal role in the chemistry of life, but is also becoming increasingly interesting as a building block in the synthesis of functional solid materials.Although commercially available as a solid, adenine's solid-state chemistry has so far been neglected. In this comprehensive study it is shown that adenine is most often marketed as a mixture of two polymorphs, one previously known, and a new polymorph.Both polymorphs exhibit layered structures with different hydrogen-bonding patterns within layers. The crystal structure of the new polymorph was elucidated using synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction. Polymorph occurrence conditions, interconversion and the difference in their thermodynamic stability were established theoretically and experimentally revealing the polymorph with Z = 2 (known) as stable relative to the polymorph with Z = 1 (new). The adenine layers in both polymorphs are connected by weak interaction likely resulting in stacking faults which are manifested in anisotropic line broadening of their powder diffraction patterns. Analysis of a few commercial samples of adenine revealed them all to be a polymorph mixture, which could be inconvenient in experiments where properties of the solid material could be relevant.

Capturing the Role of Temperature and Entropy in Crystal Polymorphs Through Molecular Simulations

“…Structures that can be isolated at one temperature may become kinetically unstable at higher temperatures. Furthermore, the thermodynamically most stable structure can also change with the temperature [18,46,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103] or pressure [76][77][78][79][80][81] leading to new observable forms.…”

“…A complicating factor in the search for commercially viable solid phases is that the stable forms of a material can change based on external factors such as temperature [18,46,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103], pressure [76][77][78][79][80][81] and humidity [47,82,83,200]. A complete experimental mapping of all possible solid forms for a given material would therefore require screening at every condition the material will encounter.…”

“…Temperature-mediated polymorphic transformations involve a crystal structure that is globally stable at low temperatures becoming metastable at higher temperatures and subsequently restructuring to a more stable form. Polymorphs that reversibly change stability order as a function of temperature in this manner are referred to as enantiotropically related forms and have been observed experimentally for a number of real organic molecules [18,46,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103].…”

“…Computational models that include entropy effects typically estimate entropy differences using methods assuming harmonic behavior [92,142,158,159]. In these approximations, all motions in the crystal are assumed to be harmonic about the energy minimized structure.…”

“…Structures that can be isolated at one temperature may become kinetically unstable at higher temperatures. Furthermore, the thermodynamically most stable structure can also change with the temperature [18,46,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103] or pressure [76][77][78][79][80][81] leading to new observable forms.The complete set of all 'observable polymorphs' for a given material therefore consists of all structures that can be produced from any crystallization method in any thermodynamic state of practical interest to the material. The challenge for experimental polymorph screening procedures is to cover a large enough range within this multidimensional space to achieve high confidence that another undiscovered form, which could compromise the performance of the product, will not be observed.…”