Nanoglobular entities can work as an effective drug delivery system because of their ability to encapsulate drugs in biological environments. One example is observed in nanoglobules prepared through the self-assembly of deoxyguanosine derivatives by thermal responsiveness behavior known as lower critical solution temperature (LCST). The colloidal formation temperature of these nanoglobules is related to the deoxyguanosine monomers' structural nature during the self-assembly process. However, once these deoxyguanosine monomers are synthesized experimentally, some of those derivatives do not show LCST behavior, making them unavailable to form the nanoparticle. For that reason, one strategy to predict deoxyguanosine derivatives' nanoglobular formation is the use of the Density Functional Theory (DFT) to calculate the binding and solvation energies of the deoxyguanosine assemblies. These results can be used to search for correlations between colloidal attributes determined experimentally (e.g., transition temperature, cloud point temperature, and enthalpy of formation) and calculated properties. These correlations could help in the design of new molecules based on predicted colloidal properties. Herein, six molecules from the literature were selected. Five of them have a lower critical solution temperature reported, and one does not present colloidal like behavior to form nanoparticles. The monomers, dimers, and tetramers were drawn utilizing Gauss View 5.0. The theoretical calculations were made with Gaussian 09 with DFT B3LYP/6-31g(d,p) level of theory and a hybrid QM/MM method with B3LYP/6-31g(d) and UFF. Our results show very weak correlations for the dimers' binding energy; however, an improvement of the correlations occurs when tetrameric binding energy is utilized. In the future, the results will help identify the monomers that form nanoglobular entities from those that experimentally will not form nanoparticles to develop efficient therapies in medicine.

Calculation of colloidal like attributes based on DFT-calculated molecular physical properties

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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