Can Melting Point Trends Help Us Develop New Tools To Control the Crystal Packing of Weakly Interacting Ions?

Abstract

Ionic liquid forms of biologically active molecules (e.g., active pharmaceutical ingredients or herbicides) are often designed by using weakly interacting, conformationally flexible ions. However, crystalline forms of these molecules involve strong interactions and efficient packing. The salts of biologically active molecules may completely lack the directional supramolecular synthons typically used in crystal engineering, and thus new tools must be developed to control the crystal packing without strong directional interactions and predict their structure–property relationships in advance. The crystal structures of tetrabutylammonium and phosphonium salts of two structurally related, biologically active ions, salicylate and dicamba, show systematic differences from their free acids and metal salts, which are dominated by strong directional interactions. Molecular conformation and the structure of oligomeric ions of acids and their conjugate bases are conserved across multiple structures. The use of flexible, weakly coordinating cations to make salts of high melting biologically active acids can dramatically change melting points based on the size and shape complementarity of the ions and the ability of the cations to enhance anion–anion repulsion.