Chemical reactivity trends of ergotamine and butenolide from electrostatic potentials and charge sensitivities

Abstract

AbstractA set of reactivity indices, including maps of the electrostatic potential and local and condensed Fukui function (FF) indices in the atomic resolution, are reported for two vasoconstricting mycotoxins: butenolide and ergotamine; both the finite difference approach of Parr and Yang as well as charge sensitivity analysis, determining the charge responses via the inversion of the hardness tensor, have been used to generate the FF data. These two routes of arriving at the atomic FF indices provide an opportunity to evaluate the available parametrizations of the semiempirical NDDO‐type of methods which have been used to determine the input charge distribution; namely, the best parametrization should generate consistent FF predictions resulting from both approaches. For butenolide, the MNDO parametrization was found to fulfill this consistency requirement. The chemical reactivity information has been used to trace possible similarities in reactivity trends of the butenolide molecule and the related fragment of ergotamine, toward hypothetical nucleophilic, electrophilic, and radical attacks. These predictions have been compared to experimental data available for other unsaturated lactones. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.