Limited Environment Fragments

An enhancement of the simple substructure approach is the Fragment Reduced to an Environment that is Limited (FREL) method introduced by Dubois et al. [7] With the FREL method several centers of the molecule are described, including their chemical environment. By taking the elements H, C, N, O, and halogens into account and combining all bond types (single, double, triple, aromatic), the authors found descriptors for 43 different FREL centers that can be used to characterize a molecule. 

The advantages of SIMS are its high sensitivity (detection limit of ppms for certain elements), its ability to detect hydrogen and the emission of molecular fragments that often bear tractable relationships with the parent structure on the surface. Disadvantages are that secondary ion formation is a poorly understood phenomenon and that quantification is often difficult. A major drawback is the matrix effect secondary ion yields of one element can vary tremendously with chemical environment. This matrix effect and the elemental sensitivity variation of five orders of magmtude across the periodic table make quantitative interpretation of SIMS spectra oftechmcal catalysts extremely difficult. 

The treatment of loss of R from sterns is trivial dissociation occurs along some kind of bond dissociation curve to give, in the imagined limit, metal and a car-banion. In solution at least, both fragments will interact with the environment at bond distortion energies wefl below the dissociative limit. 

FREL fragment reduced to an environment that is limited [3]... 

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