Molecular conformations fielded

摘要

In the ancient Indian tale of six blind men encountering an elephant, each man approaches the creature from a different direction. One finds the trunk, another a leg, the third the tail, and so on, whereupon they naturally disagree with each other as to the true appearance of the elephant (Fig. 1). And so it is with molecules - molecular properties and dynamics seem to depend on the direction from which you view them. To make matters worse, some molecules can exist as different stereoisomers - molecules that have identical atoms and sequences of bonds, but which have bonds that point in different directions.