Screening strategy for chiral and achiral separations in supercritical fluid chromatography mode.

Supercritical fluid (SF) was discovered 200 years ago, but the use of this fluid as a mobile phase in chromatography only became popular fifty years ago. The development of the supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) was progressing slowly due to technological problems since ten years; the interest for this chromatographic mode has been growing up as the construction of the SFC instruments is more or less similar with HPLC instruments. The main difference in SFC is the installation of a back pressure regulator which is implemented to control the pressure above the critical pressure. SFC is widely used in chiral chromatography where Polysaccharide phases are the most versatile in use. The mobile phase is mainly composed by CO(2) but the polarity can be increased by adding alcohol. The nature of the alcohol can change drastically the selectivity. The choice of the best tandem stationary phase / mobile phase is difficult to predict. Hence a full screening with different stationary phases and mobile phase solvents is often mandatory. For the achiral separation, SFC is more and more used. Achiral SFC can be classified as normal phase mode, it means that stationary phases are more polar than mobile phase and retention times decrease as polarity of the mobile phase increases. Most popular stationary phases are silica linked with polar group such as aminopropyl, cyanoprpyl, diol or 2-ethylpyridine. Mobile phase are generally composed by CO(2) and methanol. SFC can be used as a complementary technique for reversed phase HPLC or sometimes even to replace HPLC.

Conformational analysis of r207910, a new drug candidate for the treatment of tuberculosis, by a combined NMR and molecular modeling approach.

R207910 is an enantiomeric compound from a new class of antimycobacterial agents, the diarylquinolines [Science; 307:223 (2005)]. As enantiospecific interaction is required for biologic activity, we have undertaken a combined nuclear magnetic resonance and molecular modeling study to gain new insights into its conformation in solution and its absolute configuration. A conformational analysis using a Monte-Carlo method has been performed on each of the four possible stereomers of this compound leading to the identification of their most stable conformation. Additional ab initio calculation was performed with emphasis on the strength of the observed intramolecular hydrogen bond. Simultaneously, a complete structural identification has been carried out by a set of monodimensional and bidimensional (1)H-(13)C-NMR experiments. Determination of inter-proton distances has been achieved by a series of (1)H-(1)H ROESY NMR experiments with different mixing times followed by a volume quantification of the correlations peaks. These experimental data were compared with the theoretical distances obtained from the conformational analysis. The remarkable match shows that R207910 adopts one of the low-energy conformations predicted by molecular modeling and belongs to the (RS, SR) couple of diastereoisomers. A posteriori validation of our approach has been performed by X-ray structure determination that concluded for the RS configuration.

Discovery of pyrimidyl-5-hydroxamic acids as new potent histone deacetylase inhibitors.

A series of pyrimidyl-5-hydroxamic acids was prepared for evaluation as inhibitors of histone deacetylase (HDAC). Amino-2-pyrimidinyl can be used as a linker to provide HDAC inhibitors of good enzymatic potency.