We present a novel chemical database for gas-phase astrochemistry. Named the KInetic Database for Astrochemistry (KIDA), this database consists of gas-phase reactions with rate coefficients and uncertainties that will be vetted to the greatest extent possible. Submissions of measured and calculated rate coefficients are welcome, and will be studied by experts before inclusion into the database. Besides providing kinetic information for the interstellar medium, KIDA is planned to contain such data for planetary atmospheres and for circumstellar envelopes. Each year, a subset of the reactions in the database (kida.uva) will be provided as a network for the simulation of the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds with temperatures between 10 K and 300 K. We also provide a code, named Nahoon, to study the timedependent gas-phase chemistry of 0D and 1D interstellar sources.

Stepwise hydration of uracil has been theoretically revisited using different methods ranging from classical force fields to quantum chemical approaches. Hydration initially begins within the uracil plane but proceeds at four molecules into three-dimensional configurations or even water clusters next to the nucleobase. The relative stability between the various structures is significantly affected by zero-point energy and finite temperature (entropy) effects and also gives rise to markedly different responses to an excitation by an impinging high-energy proton. In particular, charge transfer to the molecular complex is dramatically altered in collisions toward the coating cluster but barely modified for peripheral hydration patterns.