CONFORMATIONAL-ANALYSIS OF IBUPROFEN BY CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC DATABASE SEARCHING AND POTENTIAL-ENERGY CALCULATION

The conformational flexibility of the Ibuprofen molecule has been anal ysed by crystallographic database searching and potential energy calcu lations. The database method involves a fragment search of the Cambrid ge Structural Database (CSD) which identifies families of molecules wi th common structural fragments derived from Ibuprofen. Scatterplots of independent torsion angles defining the fragment geometries reveal st ructure correlations which map onto low-energy regions of the Ibuprofe n potential energy surface. Thus, the preferred conformational space o f the molecule is mapped out by the scatterplots, in accordance with t he underlying principle of structure correlation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.