The stability of covalent dative bond significantly increases with increasing solvent polarity
Rabindranath Lo, Debashree Manna, Maximilián Lamanec, Martin Dračínský, Petr Bouř, Tao Wu, Guillaume Bastien, Jiřı́ Kaleta, Vijay Madhav Miriyala, V. Špirko, Anna Mašínová, Dana Nachtigallová, Pavel Hobza
Abstract
Abstract It is generally expected that a solvent has only marginal effect on the stability of a covalent bond. In this work, we present a combined computational and experimental study showing a surprising stabilization of the covalent/dative bond in Me 3 NBH 3 complex with increasing solvent polarity. The results show that for a given complex, its stability correlates with the strength of the bond. Notably, the trends in calculated changes of binding (free) energies, observed with increasing solvent polarity, match the differences in the solvation energies (Δ E solv ) of the complex and isolated fragments. Furthermore, the studies performed on the set of the dative complexes, with different atoms involved in the bond, show a linear correlation between the changes of binding free energies and Δ E solv . The observed data indicate that the ionic part of the combined ionic-covalent character of the bond is responsible for the stabilizing effects of solvents.