Virtual high throughput screening, typically driven by first-principles, density functional theory calculations, has emerged as a powerful tool for the discovery of new materials. Although the computational materials science community has benefited from open source tools for the rapid structure generation, calculation, and analysis of crystalline inorganic materials, software and strategies to address the unique challenges of inorganic complex discovery have not been as widely available. We present a unified view of our recent developments in the open source molSimplify code for inorganic discovery. Building on our previous efforts in the automated generation of highly accurate inorganic molecular structures, first-principles simulation, and property analysis to accelerate high-throughput screening, we have recently incorporated a neural network that both improves structure generation and predicts electronic properties prior to first-principles calculation. We also provide an overview of how multi-million molecule organic libraries can be leveraged for inorganic discovery alongside cheminformatics concepts of molecular diversity in order to efficiently traverse chemical space. We demonstrate all of these tools on the discovery of design rules for octahedral Fe(II/III) redox couples with nitrogen ligands. Over a search of only approximately 40 new molecules, we obtain redox potentials relative to the Fc/Fc + couple ranging from-1 to 4.5 V in aqueous solution. Our new automated correlation analysis reveals heteroatom identity and the degree of structural branching to be key ligand descriptors in determining redox potential. This inorganic discovery toolkit provides a promising approach to advancing transition metal complex design.

Transition-metal complexes are attractive targets for the design of catalysts and functional materials. The behavior of the metal−organic bond, while very tunable for achieving target properties, is challenging to predict and necessitates searching a wide and complex space to identify needles in haystacks for target applications. This review will focus on the techniques that make high-throughput search of transition-metal chemical space feasible for the discovery of complexes with desirable properties. The review will cover the development, promise, and limitations of "traditional" computational chemistry (i.e., force field, semiempirical, and density functional theory methods) as it pertains to data generation for inorganic molecular discovery. The review will also discuss the opportunities and limitations in leveraging experimental data sources. We will focus on how advances in statistical modeling, artificial intelligence, multiobjective optimization, and automation accelerate discovery of lead compounds and design rules. The overall objective of this review is to showcase how bringing together advances from diverse areas of computational chemistry and computer science have enabled the rapid uncovering of structure−property relationships in transition-metal chemistry. We aim to highlight how unique considerations in motifs of metal−organic bonding (e.g., variable spin and oxidation state, and bonding strength/nature) set them and their discovery apart from more commonly considered organic molecules. We will also highlight how uncertainty and relative data scarcity in transition-metal chemistry motivate specific developments in machine learning representations, model training, and in computational chemistry. Finally, we will conclude with an outlook of areas of opportunity for the accelerated discovery of transition-metal complexes.

Chirped-pulse millimeter-wave (CPmmW) spectroscopy is the first broadband (multi-GHz in each shot) Fourier-transform technique for high-resolution survey spectroscopy in the millimeter-wave region. The design is based on chirped-pulse Fourier-transform microwave (CP-FTMW) spectroscopy [G. G. Brown, B. C. Dian, K. O. Douglass, S. M. Geyer, S. T. Shipman, and B. H. Pate, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 79, 053103 (2008)], which is described for frequencies up to 20 GHz. We have built an instrument that covers the 70-102 GHz frequency region and can acquire up to 12 GHz of spectrum in a single shot. Challenges to using chirped-pulse Fourier-transform spectroscopy in the millimeter-wave region include lower achievable sample polarization, shorter Doppler dephasing times, and problems with signal phase stability. However, these challenges have been partially overcome and preliminary tests indicate a significant advantage over existing millimeter-wave spectrometers in the time required to record survey spectra. Further improvement to the sensitivity is expected as more powerful broadband millimeter-wave amplifiers become affordable. The ability to acquire broadband Fourier-transform millimeter-wave spectra enables rapid measurement of survey spectra at sufficiently high resolution to measure diagnostically important electronic properties such as electric and magnetic dipole moments and hyperfine coupling constants. It should also yield accurate relative line strengths across a broadband region. Several example spectra are presented to demonstrate initial applications of the spectrometer.

Biosynthetic enzyme complexes selectively catalyze challenging chemical transformations, including alkane functionalization (e.g., halogenation of threonine, Thr, by nonheme iron SyrB2). However, the role of complex formation in enabling reactivity and guiding selectivity is poorly understood, owing to the challenges associated with obtaining detailed structural information of the dynamically associating protein complexes. Combining over 10 µs of classical molecular dynamics of SyrB2 and the acyl carrier protein SyrB1 with large-scale QM/MM simulation, we investigate the substrate-protein and protein-protein dynamics that give rise to experimentally observed substrate positioning and reactivity trends. We confirm the presence of a hypothesized substrate-delivery channel in SyrB2 through free energy simulations that show channel opening with a low free energy barrier. We identify stabilizing interactions at the SyrB2/SyrB1 interface that are compatible with phosphopantatheine (PPant) delivery of substrate to SyrB2. By sampling metal-substrate distances observed in experimental spectroscopy of native SyrB2/SyrB1-PPant-S-Thr and non-native substrates, we characterize essential protein-substrate interactions that are responsible for substrate positioning, and thus, reactivity. We observe the hydroxyl sidechain and terminal amine of the native Thr substrate to form cooperative hydrogen bonds with a single N123 residue in SyrB2. In comparison, nonnative substrates that lack the hydroxyl interact more flexibly with the protein and therefore can orient closer to the Fe center, explaining their preferential hydroxylation and higher turnover frequencies.

Rotational analyses are reported for a number of newly-discovered vibrational levels of the S 1 -trans ( Ã 1 A u ) state of C 2 H 2 . These levels are combinations where the Franck-Condon active ! 2 " and ! 3 " vibrational modes are excited together with the low-lying bending vibrations, 3

Biosynthetic enzyme complexes selectively catalyze challenging chemical transformations, including alkane functionalization (e.g., halogenation of threonine, Thr, by non-heme iron SyrB2). However, the role of complex formation in enabling reactivity and guiding selectivity is poorly understood, owing to the challenges associated with obtaining detailed structural information of the dynamically associating protein complexes. Combining over 10 ms of classical molecular dynamics of SyrB2 and the acyl carrier protein SyrB1 with large-scale QM/MM simulation, we investigate the substrate–protein and protein–protein dynamics that give rise to experimentally observed substrate positioning and reactivity trends. We confirm the presence of a hypothesized substrate-delivery channel in SyrB2 through free energy simulations that show channel opening with a low free energy barrier. We identify stabilizing interactions at the SyrB2/SyrB1 interface that are compatible with phosphopantatheine (PPant) delivery of substrate to SyrB2. By sampling metal–substrate distances observed in experimental spectroscopy of native SyrB2/SyrB1-PPant-<i>S</i>-Thr and non-native substrates, we characterize essential protein–substrate interactions that are responsible for substrate positioning, and thus, reactivity. We observe the hydroxyl sidechain and terminal amine of the native Thr substrate to form cooperative hydrogen bonds with a single N123 residue in SyrB2. In comparison, non-native substrates that lack the hydroxyl interact more flexibly with the protein and therefore can orient closer to the Fe center, explaining their preferential hydroxylation and higher turnover frequencies.

Indium phosphide quantum dots (QDs) represent promising replacements for more toxic QDs, but InP QD production lags behind other QD materials due to limited understanding of how to tune InP QD growth. We carry out a first-principles, computational screen of the tuning of In carboxylate precursor chemistry to alter the kinetics of elementary steps in InP QD growth. We employ a large database normally used for discovery of therapeutic drug-like molecules to discover design rules for these inorganic complexes while maintaining realism (i.e., stable, synthetically accessible substituents) and providing diversity in a 210-molecule test set. We show the In−O bond cleavage energy, which is tuned through ligand functionalization, to be a useful proxy for In−P bond formation energetics in InP QD synthesis. Energy decomposition analysis on a 32-molecule subset reveals that lower activation energies correlate to later transition states, due to stabilization from greater In−P bond formation and more favorable reaction energetics. Our simulations suggest that altering ligand nucleophilicity tunes the reaction barrier over a 10 kcal/mol range, providing the conjugate acid's pK a as an experimental handle to lead to better control of growth conditions and to improve synthesized InP QD quality. Importantly, these trends hold regardless of phosphorus precursor chemistries and in the longer chain length ligands typically used in synthesis.

Rotational analyses have been carried out for the overtones of the nu(4) (torsion) and nu(6) (in-plane cis-bend) vibrations of the A (1)A(u) state of C(2)H(2). The v(4)+v(6)=2 vibrational polyad was observed in high-sensitivity one-photon laser-induced fluorescence spectra and the v(4)+v(6)=3 polyad was observed in IR-UV double resonance spectra via the ground state nu(3) (Sigma(+) (u)) and nu(3)+nu(4) (Pi(u)) vibrational levels. The structures of these polyads are dominated by the effects of vibrational angular momentum: Vibrational levels of different symmetry interact via strong a-and b-axis Coriolis coupling, while levels of the same symmetry interact via Darling-Dennison resonance, where the interaction parameter has the exceptionally large value K(4466)=-51.68 cm(-1). The K-structures of the polyads bear almost no resemblance to the normal asymmetric top patterns, and many local avoided crossings occur between close-lying levels with nominal K-values differing by one or more units. Least squares analysis shows that the coupling parameters change only slightly with vibrational excitation, which has allowed successful predictions of the structures of the higher polyads: A number of weak bands from the v(4)+v(6)=4 and 5 polyads have been identified unambiguously. The state discovered by Scherer et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 85, 6315 (1986)], which appears to interact with the K=1 levels of the 3(3) vibrational state at low J, is identified as the second highest of the five K=1 members of the v(4)+v(6)=4 polyad. After allowing for the Darling-Dennison resonance, the zero-order bending structure can be represented by omega(4)=764.71, omega(6)=772.50, x(44)=0.19, x(66)=-4.23, and x(46)=11.39 cm(-1). The parameters x(46) and K(4466) are both sums of contributions from the vibrational angular momentum and from the anharmonic force field. For x(46) these contributions are 14.12 and -2.73 cm(-1), respectively, while the corresponding values for K(4466) are -28.24 and -23.44 cm(-1). It is remarkable how severely the coupling of nu(4) and nu(6) distorts the overtone polyads, and also how in this case the effects of vibrational angular momentum outweigh those of anharmonicity in causing the distortion.