Level selection, method development case studies

The computational study of the osmium dihydroxylation of aliphatic al-kenes is much more complicated than the case of aromatic alkenes due to the large number of conformations that the former could adopt. To overcome this issue, we considered the system to be composed of two different parts the catalyst and the olefin. For the catalyst, the conformation considered is that from the X-ray structure. As already shown in the study of styrene [95], and in some experimental works [98], the catalyst is a fairly rigid molecule. For the aliphatic alkenes under study, there is a large number of possible conformations in addition, the stability of an olefin conformation is also affected by the interactions between the olefin substituent and the catalyst. Therefore, the catalyst must be included in the conformational search. The conformational analysis was done using a scheme based on the systematic search approach [99]. The strategy consisted of two parts first we developed a method to identify all of the possible conformations afterwards, we screened all of the possible conformations at MM level to select the most stable. Finally, we only carried out the relatively expensive QM/MM calculations on these selected conformations. 

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