Structural insights into the biological activity of a thioxopyrimidine derivative.

Bacterial resistance to the main widespread antibiotics, such as those based on quinolones, is a concern of the scientific community, leading to the search for new classes of molecules that can be used as an alternative. Here, we investigate the crystalline and chemical characteristics of a thioxopyrimide to understand its demonstrated biological activity and to identify which portion of the molecule can be used as a framework to develop new antibiotics. For this purpose, structural studies of ethyl 4-methyl-2-phenyl-6-thioxo-1,6-dihydro-5-pyrimidinecarboxylate were carried out aided by Hirshfeld surface analysis, as well as theoretical calculations on frontier molecular orbitals, molecular electrostatic potential, and conformational stability, in addition to docking studies targeting topoisomerase IV. The docking results show a reasonable accommodation of the molecule at the topoisomerase IV binding site and interact mainly by hydrogen bonds between the thioxopyrimidine portion with Glu198, Thr292, and Gly225, aided by hydrophobic interactions involving the rest of the molecule. These results suggest a relationship between the antibacterial activity shown mainly with the 4-thioxopyrimidine portion, leading to the investigation of new compounds that use this scaffold.

Quantum Monte Carlo with density matrix: potential energy curve derived properties.

In this work, we used diffusion quantum Monte Carlo with density matrix (d-DMC) and variational quantum Monte Carlo (d-VMC) to determine the potential energy curve (PEC) and obtain the spectroscopic constants of H2 molecule in the ground state, in order to evaluate the capability of these methods to provide an accurate PEC description. These quantum Monte Carlo methods build with density matrix are new approaches to conventional quantum Monte Carlo methods based on wave function formed by product of α and ß determinants. To investigate the robustness of d-DMC, we performed calculations with two different basis sets and analyzed the influence of the size of these sets on results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that shows the dissociation energy and rotational constant obtained from d-QMC. We found that the quality of PEC described by the d-DMC is essentially coincident with the most accurate results available in the literature, regardless of the complexity of basis set employed.