Vibrational circular dichroism enantiomeric similarity index improvement for absolute configuration discrimination using individual infrared scaling factors

The use of IR individual scaling factors (ISF) for the correction of DFT-calculated frequencies, and its effect on IR and VCD similarity functions, has been evaluated using (+)-(R)-3-methylcyclopentanone as a probe molecule. Contrary to using a single scaling factor to improve spectra matching, this approach sequentially searches for the optimal scaling factor for each calculated transition using a computational search algorithm to maximize the overlap of the calculated and observed IR spectra expressed as the IR similarity (S-IR) function. The obtained ISFs are then applied to the calculated frequencies, which are used to produce a scaled VCD spectrum for comparison with the observed trace, thereby yielding enantiomeric similarity index (ESI) values as a similarity measure. This procedure provides a significant improvement of the S-IR and ESI values when compared with the use of a single scale factor, showing 15.1% and 34.1% in average increments, respectively, and values as high as 0.98 and 0.94, respectively. When a set of manually found ISFs is used, most differences in S-IR and ESI performance disappear, and nearly perfect spectra matches are found throughout the levels of theory tested. This suggests that the observed differences in computed IR/VCD spectra with commonly used levels of theory are related to differences in frequency rather than to intensity accuracy. Finally, the use of ISFs is expected to enhance the ability to aide stereochemical assignments, particularly in cases where sufficiently accurate frequencies are difficult to obtain due to the system size or complexity.