Exploring the Antioxidant Potency of New Naphthalene-Based Chalcone Derivatives: Design, Synthesis, Antioxidant Evaluation, Docking Study, DFT Calculations.

Abstract

Naphthalene-based chalcone derivative was successfully synthesized through the condensation of 2,4-dichlorobenzaldehyde with 2-acetylnaphthalene. This chalcone, denoted as compound 1, demonstrated a versatile reactivity upon treatment with both nitrogen and carbon nucleophiles, and yielded diverse heterocyclic scaffolds such as pyrazoline, thiazole, pyrimidine, pyran, and pyridine derivatives. The pyrazoline aldehyde derivative 7 was further derivatized to produce the hydrazide-hydrazone 13, namely, (1H-pyrazol-1-yl)methylene)acetohydrazide, which was exploited to synthesize derivatives of 2-oxo-2H-chromene-3-carbohydrazide 14, 2-(4-oxo-4,5-dihydrothiazol-2-yl)acetohydrazide 15, and 3-(4-nitrophenyl)acrylohydrazide 16. All the newly synthesized compounds were characterized by melting point, elemental analysis, as well as FT-IR, 1 H-NMR and mass spectroscopy. Furthermore, these heterocyclic derivatives were screened for their antioxidant capacities using the DPPH radical assay. The results showed that compounds 5 and 10 are the most potent antioxidants with IC50 values 178, 177(μM), respectively. comparable to that of ascorbic acid which has IC50 value 148. Meanwhile, compounds 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 exhibited moderate antioxidant activities with IC50 values ranged from 266 to 291(μM). Thus, these heterocycles could emerge as promising antioxidant drugs for the treatment of oxidative stress-related diseases. Finally, molecular docking was conducted to study the binding affinity for the most potent antioxidant compounds 5, 10, and ascorbic acid inside the active pocket of Human Peroxiredoxin 5 (1HD2). DFT calculations and global descriptors were calculated for the most potent compounds to correlate the relation between chemical structure and reactivity.