The quest for concepts of isostructurality
in organic crystals
has been long and mostly based on geometric data, even with the development
of modern software. This field of study is of great interest to the
pharmaceutical industry and for the prediction of crystal structures.
Despite this, there is still no methodology that provides broad quantitative
and comparable similarity data between two complete crystalline structures.
The present study demonstrated that the similarity between two crystalline
structures could be estimated from the similarity between the two
“supramolecular clusters”. Quantitative indexes for
similarity comparisons of crystal structures were shown using nine
5-aryl-1-(1,1-dimethylethyl)-1
H
-pyrazoles as a model.
This proposal includes the quantitative data of a geometric parameter
(
I
D
), a contact area parameter (
I
C
), and an energetic parameter (
I
G
). The proposed indexes exhibited good perspective regarding
the similarity data and distinct regions of similarity. The range
of similarity was set at
I
X
≥ 0.80,
0.80 >
I
X
> 0.60, and
I
X
≤ 0.60 (X = D, C, or G). Indexes with a value
near 1.0 indicate systems with isostructural, isocontact, and isoenergetic
behavior. The results indicated that supramolecular structures with
high similarity must have high values for all three indexes (
I
D
,
I
C
, and
I
G
).