{"id":230826,"date":"2026-02-07T17:09:06","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T23:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/mapping-tool-delivers-quantitative-visualisations-of-steric-interactions"},"modified":"2026-02-07T17:09:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T23:09:06","slug":"mapping-tool-delivers-quantitative-visualisations-of-steric-interactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/mapping-tool-delivers-quantitative-visualisations-of-steric-interactions","title":{"rendered":"Mapping tool delivers quantitative visualisations of steric interactions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mapping-tool-delivers-quantitative-visualisations-of-steric-interactions2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Another system the team Self on was a set of Ni\u2013phosphine complexes, where steric interactions often limit the accessibility of the phosphine ligand\u2019s lone pair. The researchers found that their results correlated well with the traditional method to study this \u2013 Tolman\u2019s angles \u2013 but also showed that the interaction between the nickel centre and the ligand is smaller than Tolman analysis suggests.<\/p>\n<p>These insights could prove useful for chemists. As Paton notes, \u2018you could imagine comparing many different ligands in a library with this tool and using it to, for example, characterise or understand performance, maybe even ligand design\u2026 ultimately, that will allow us to think about how we might design better and more efficient systems and reactions.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>H\u00e9non highlights that Self also works inside molecules, not just between them. \u2018Previous methods were designed for two separate molecules approaching each other. But what about rotation barriers within a single molecule. That\u2019s intramolecular steric repulsion, and Self handles it naturally. Other methods struggle badly with this. This opens new perspectives.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another system the team Self on was a set of Ni\u2013phosphine complexes, where steric interactions often limit the accessibility of the phosphine ligand\u2019s lone pair. The researchers found that their results correlated well with the traditional method to study this \u2013 Tolman\u2019s angles \u2013 but also showed that the interaction between the nickel centre and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1965],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}