On the rhodamines and their presence in biologically active ligands

An innovative use of cluster analysis is presented to compare the output from different levels of theory. A dendrogram shows the relative energies of the tautomers of methylidene rhodanine (5-methylene-2-thioxo-thiazolidin-4-one) computed by the semiempirical molecular orbital method AM1, are remarkably similar to the ab initio values from the LANL2DZ++(d,p) basis set, which involves effective core potentials augmented by polarization and diffuse functions. However, the optimized bond lengths and bond angles at the AM1 and AM1/SM1 levels do not agree well with those obtained at the 6-31G* and LANL2DZ++(d,p) levels of theory or with experiment. Database searching is used to obtain an indication of how common the rhodanine ring is. The prevalence of rhodanine-containing compounds of pharmaceutical interest is very small despite the fact that the compounds exhibit a wide variety of bioactivity. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.