A novel synthesis of octahydropyrido[3,2-c]carbazole framework of aspidospermidine alkaloids and a combined computational, FT-IR, NMR, NBO, NLO, FMO, MEP study of the cis-4a-Ethyl-1(2hydroxyethyl)-2,3,4,4a,5,6,7,11c-octahydro-1H-pyrido[3,2-c] carbazole

Abstract

In this study, we performed a novel synthesis of the octahydropyrido[3,2-c]carbazole derivative 6 from 1 in five steps with a 34% overall yield. We also developed a unique compound 2 by a cyclization reaction from the cyanoethylation of compound 1, which is an intermediate step in the synthesis of Aspidospermidine. The parent compound of Aspidospermidine alkaloids, comprise a large family of diverse structures. As a result, we obtained octahydropyrido[3,2-c]carbazole (6)and the proposed method may be applicable to other alkaloids. All quantum chemical calculations of the cis-4a-Ethyl-1-(2-hydroxyethyl)-2,3,4,4a,5,6,7,11c-octahydro-1H-pyrido[3,2-c]carbazole have been performed with the DFT/B3LYP and HF methods by using the Gaussian 09W software package. The most stable conformer obtained from the Potential Energy Surface (PES) scan analysis at the B3LYP/6-31G** level of theory in the gas phase was used as the starting structure of the title compound to further computational analysis. The Natural Bond Orbital (NBO) and NLO analyses were performed to evaluate the intra-molecular interactions contributing to the molecular stability and to predict the optical properties of the title compound, respectively. Gauge-Independent Atomic Orbital (GIAO) approach was used to determine the H-1 and C-1 NMR chemical shifts of the title compound by subtracting the shielding constants of TMS at both methods. The calculated vibrational frequencies of the title compound were assigned by using the VEDA program and were scaled down by using the scaling factor 0.9668 for B3LYP/6-311++G(d, p) and 0.9050 for HF/6-311++G(d, p) to improve the calculated vibrational frequencies. The FMO (frontier molecular orbital) analysis was evaluated to predict the chemical and physical properties of the title compound and the HOMO, LUMO, and MEP diagrams were visualized by GaussView 4.1 program to present the reactive site of the title compound. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.