How constraint programming can help chemists to generate Benzenoid structures and assess the local Aromaticity of Benzenoids

Autor: Yannick Carissan, Denis Hagebaum-Reignier, Nicolas Prcovic, Cyril Terrioux, Adrien Varet
Přispěvatelé: Chimie Theorique et Modèles (CTOM), Institut des Sciences Moléculaires de Marseille (ISM2), Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-École Centrale de Marseille (ECM)-Institut de Chimie du CNRS (INC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-École Centrale de Marseille (ECM)-Institut de Chimie du CNRS (INC)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), COntraintes, ALgorithmes et Applications (COALA), Laboratoire d'Informatique et Systèmes (LIS), Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-Université de Toulon (UTLN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Aix Marseille Université (AMU)-Université de Toulon (UTLN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), ANR-16-CE40-0028,DE-MO-GRAPH,Décomposition de Modèles Graphiques(2016)
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Constraints
Constraints, 2022, ⟨10.1007/s10601-022-09328-x⟩
ISSN: 1572-9354
1383-7133
Popis: International audience; Benzenoids are a subfamily of hydrocarbons (molecules that are only made of hydrogen and carbon atoms) whose carbon atoms form hexagons. These molecules are widely studied in theoretical chemistry and have a lot of concrete applications. Then, there is a lot of problems relative to this subject, like the enumeration of all its Kekulé structures (i.e. all valid configurations of double bonds). In this article, we focus our attention on two issues: the generation of benzenoid structures and the assessment of the local aromaticity. On the one hand, generating benzenoids that have certain structural and/or chemical properties (e.g. having a given number of hexagons or a particular structure from a graph viewpoint) is an interesting and important problem. It constitutes a preliminary step for studying their chemical properties. In this paper, we show that modeling this problem in Choco Solver and just letting its search engine generate the solutions is a fast enough and very flexible approach. It can allow to generate many different kinds of benzenoids with predefined structural properties by posting new constraints, saving the efforts of developing bespoke algorithmic methods for each kind of benzenoids. On the other hand, we want to assess the local aromaticity of a given benzenoid. This is a central issue in theoretical chemistry since aromaticity cannot be measured. Nowadays, computing aromaticity requires quantum chemistry calculations that are too expensive to be used on medium to large-sized molecules. In this article, we describe how constraint programming can be useful in order to assess the aromaticity of benzenoids. Moreover, we show that our method is much faster than the reference one, namely NICS.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz: