7-Azaindole breaks carboxylic acid dimers and simplifies VCD spectra analyses of natural products

Abstract

The determination of absolute configurations of carboxylic acids by vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectroscopy is often complicated by self-aggregation and the subsequent need to compute the spectra of the aggregates. We show that 7-azaindole effectively breaks up these aggregates by stronger complemental hydrogen bonding to the COOH moiety, enabling drastic simplification and acceleration of VCD spectra calculations.