Enumeration of substitutional isomers with restrictive mutual positions of ligands: I. Overall counts

We address systematics for the enumeration of substitutional isomers when there is constrained positioning of ligands on a molecular skeleton. One constraint involves 'restrictive ligands' where two of the same kind are forbidden to occupy adjacent sites in a molecular skeleton. This may arise because of steric hindrance, or because of groups which in neighbor proximity react to eliminate one. For instance, no pair of -OH groups attach to the same C atom in a molecular skeleton. In another case, malonic acid residues decarboxylate leaving no more than one decarboxylation in each residue. The enumeration with such restrictive ligands may be addressed via a Polya-theoretic cycle index hybridized with the graph-theoretic independence polynomial (when there is just a single such neighbor-excluding ligand and another which is not), while more generally a hybridization with the chromatic polynomial is needed. Another substitional-isomer constraint involves bidentate ligands, with each ligand-part occupying adjacent sites, and possibly also with additional separate unidentate ligands. Here, the set of all pure & mixed such ligand placements is analytically represented by a 'symmetry-reduced' matching polynomial (which is a hybrid now of the matching polynomial and Polya's cycle index). This result gives the generating function for isomer enumeration, taking into account every possible so-restricted assortment of the employed ligands. Here we make such novel hybridizations (for these and other graphtheoretic polynomials) to deal with such oft-encountered chemical problems, which nevertheless transcend typical earlier unconstrained formulizations. Further subsymmetry classification & enumerations, along with examples are considered in a further article.