Structural diversification of canonical nucleic acid bases and nucleotide analogues by tautomerism has been proposed to be a powerful on/off switching mechanism allowing regulation of many biological processes mediated by RNA enzymes and aptamers. Despite the suspected biological importance of tautomerism, attempts to observe minor tautomeric forms in nucleic acid or hybrid nucleic acid-ligand ...

A compound exhibits (prototropic) tautomerism if it can be represented by two or more structures that are related by a formal intramolecular movement of a hydrogen atom from one heavy atom position to another. When the movement of the proton is accompanied by the opening or closing of a ring it is called ring-chain tautomerism. This type of tautomerism is well observed in carbohydrates, but it ...

We have used the Chemical Structure DataBase (CSDB) of the NCI CADD Group, an aggregated collection of over 150 small-molecule databases totaling 103.5 million structure records, to conduct tautomerism analyses on one of the largest currently existing sets of real (i.e. not computer-generated) compounds. This analysis was carried out using calculable chemical structure identifiers developed by ...

Heterocyclic nucleic acid bases and their analogs can adopt multiple tautomeric forms due to the presence of multiple solvent-exchangeable protons. In DNA, spontaneous formation of minor tautomers has been speculated to contribute to mutagenic mispairings during DNA replication, whereas in RNA, minor tautomeric forms have been proposed to enhance the structural and functional diversity of RNA e...

Proton tautomerism is a general phenomenon in organic molecules and plays a vital role in many fields of chemistry and biochemistry. The tautomerism of salicylideneanilines [eq(1)] has attracted a considerable attention because it is closely related to thermoand photochromism. Salicylideneanilines greatly favor the enol form over the cis-keto form in the gas phase. We demonstrate here that the ...

A ferrocene-functionalised ureidopyrimidinone has been synthesised that can signal the solvent-induced tautomerism of the dimeric 4[1H]-pyrimidinone form to the monomeric 6[1H]-pyrimidinone form.

For molecules with mobile hydrogen atoms, the result of quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs) as well as quantum chemical geometry optimisation depends on the position of the respective hydrogen atoms. Thus to obtain reliable results, tautomerism needs to be taken into account. With our in-house software ChemProp, we set up four different kinds of tautomerism and generated the t...

Histidine is an important natural amino acid, involved in many relevant biological processes, which, because of its physical properties, proved difficult to characterize experimentally in its neutral form. In this work, neutral histidine has been generated in the gas phase by laser ablation of solid samples and its N(ε)H tautomeric form unraveled through its rotational spectrum. The quadrupole ...

Viral lethal mutagenesis is a strategy whereby the innate immune system or mutagenic pool nucleotides increase the error rate of viral replication above the error catastrophe limit. Lethal mutagenesis has been proposed as a mechanism for several antiviral compounds, including the drug candidate 5-aza-5,6-dihydro-2'-deoxycytidine (KP1212), which causes A-to-G and G-to-A mutations in the HIV geno...