Fulminating Gold and Silver

This Essay deals with the fascinating and highly explosive compounds fulminating gold and fulminating silver, which are easily made by treatment of gold dissolved in aqua regia with ammonia, and by reaction of silver oxide or silver salts with ammonia, respectively. Fulminating gold in particular captivated the alchemists in the 16th to 18th centuries. Numerous preparations were described, as well as numerous attempts to make volatile, sublimable or distillable gold, and to use the products so obtained (which were most likely gold chlorides) to make the sought‐after tincture, which would “heal” the “impure” metals and transform them into gold, and equally be a panacea to cure all human illnesses.     

pmx: Automated protein structure and topology generation for alchemical perturbations

Computational protein design requires methods to accurately estimate free energy changes in protein stability or binding upon an amino acid mutation. From the different approaches available, molecular dynamics‐based alchemical free energy calculations are unique in their accuracy and solid theoretical basis. The challenge in using these methods lies in the need to generate hybrid structures and topologies representing two physical states of a system. A custom made hybrid topology may prove useful for a particular mutation of interest, however, a high throughput mutation analysis calls for a more general approach. In this work, we present an automated procedure to generate hybrid structures and topologies for the amino acid mutations in all commonly used force fields. The described software is compatible with the Gromacs simulation package. The mutation libraries are readily supported for five force fields, namely Amber99SB, Amber99SB*‐ILDN, OPLS‐AA/L, Charmm22*, and Charmm36. © 2014 The Authors Journal of Computational Chemistry Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

First principles view on chemical compound space: Gaining rigorous atomistic control of molecular properties

A well‐defined notion of chemical compound space (CCS) is essential for gaining rigorous control of properties through variation of elemental composition and atomic configurations. Here, we give an introduction to an atomistic first principles perspective on CCS. First, CCS is discussed in terms of variational nuclear charges in the context of conceptual density functional and molecular grand‐canonical ensemble theory. Thereafter, we revisit the notion of compound pairs, related to each other via “alchemical” interpolations involving fractional nuclear charges in the electronic Hamiltonian. We address Taylor expansions in CCS, property nonlinearity, improved predictions using reference compound pairs, and the ounce‐of‐gold prize challenge to linearize CCS. Finally, we turn to machine learning of analytical structure property relationships in CCS. These relationships correspond to inferred, rather than derived through variational principle, solutions of the electronic Schrödinger equation. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

中国古代化学的成就及缺憾

中国古代化学取得了令人瞩目的成就,对物质及其变化的认识上,揭示了物质可分、运动、守衡的规律;在化学实验上,炼丹家们掌握了一些物质的性质、制法和鉴定方法;在化学工艺和技术上发明了火药、金属的冶炼和造纸术等.但中国古代化学也留给我们不少缺憾,值得我们深思.