A computational study of the electronic structure and the chemical activity of curcumin and some novel curcuminoids by density functional theory

Structural modification of curcumin represents a strategy to improve its stability, water solubility, pharmaceutical properties and bioactivity. In this context, numerous structural analogues of curcumin, including curcuminoids, have been developed. In this paper, the precise density functional theory computations were used for investigating the electronic and geometrical structure of curcumin and some of its derivatives. The chemical activity of the considered molecules was investigated with the help of the global softness and hardness concepts. Among the studied molecules, bisdemethoxycurcumin had the most chemical activity and hexahydrocurcumin had the most stable structure. Among two isomers of the curcumin, the enol isomer was found to be active.     

Selective formation of spiro dihydrofurans from one-pot reaction of dimedone with BrCN and aldehydes in the presence of Et3N

Reaction of 5,5-dimethylcyclohexane-1,3-dione (dimedone), aldehydes and cyanogen bromide in the presence of triethylamine leads to the selective formation of spiro dihydrofurans in moderate to good yields at room temperature.     

An Approximate Approach for Systems of Singular Volterra Integral Equations Based on Taylor Expansion

In this article, an extended Taylor expansion method is proposed to estimate the solution of linear singular Volterra integral equations systems. The method is based on combining the m-th order Taylor polynomial of unknown functions at an arbitrary point and integration method, such that the given system of singular integral equations is converted into a system of linear equations with respect to unknown functions and their derivatives. The required solutions are obtained by solving the resulting linear system. The proposed method gives a very satisfactory solution,which can be performed by any symbolic mathematical packages such as Maple, Mathematica, etc. Our proposed approach provides a significant advantage that the m-th order approximate solutions are equal to exact solutions if the exact solutions are polynomial functions of degree less than or equal to m. We present an error analysis for the proposed method to emphasize its reliability. Six numerical examples are provided to show the accuracy and the efficiency of the suggested scheme for which the exact solutions are known in advance.     

Phosphorylated PEG (PPEG) as a new support for generation of nano‐Pd(0): application to the Heck–Mizoroki and Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reactions

Polyethylene glycols (PEGs) with different molecular weights (M_w = 200, 400, 1000) were phosphorylated to their bis‐diphenyl phosphinite derivatives as stable solids which are melted in the range 140–160°C. These phosphorylated PEGs were used as ligands and reducing agents to generate nano‐Pd(0) catalysts in 2.5–8.3 nm. The nano‐Pd(0) particles supported on phosphorylated PEG₂₀₀ were applied for the efficient Heck–Mizoroki carbon–carbon coupling reactions of ArX (X = Cl, Br, I) at 80–100°C under solvent‐free conditions and for the Suzuki–Miyaura coupling reaction in ethanol at 70°C. The catalyst was recycled easily and reused for several runs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.