Stability and Characteristics of the Halogen Bonding Interaction in an Anion–Anion Complex: A Computational Chemistry Study

Halogen bonding is the noncovalent interaction between the positively charged σ-hole of organohalogens and nucleophiles. In reality, both the organohalogen and nucleophile could be deprotonated to form anions, which may lead to the vanishing of the σ-hole and possible repulsion between the two anions. However, our database survey in this study revealed that there are halogen bonding-like interactions between two anions. Quantum mechanics calculations with small model complexes composed of halobenzoates and propiolate indicated that the anion-anion halogen bonding is unstable in vacuum but attractive in solvents. Impressively, the QM optimized halogen bonding distance between the two anions is shorter than that in a neutral system, indicating a possibly stronger halogen bonding interaction, which is verified by the calculated binding energies. Furthermore, natural bond orbital and quantum theory of atoms in molecule analyses also suggested stronger anion-anion halogen bonding than that of the neutral one. Energy decomposition by symmetry adapted perturbation theory revealed that the strong binding might be attributed to large induction energy. The calculations on 4 protein-ligand complexes from PDB by the QM/MM method demonstrated that the anion-anion halogen bonding could contribute to the ligands' binding affinity up to ∼3 kcal/mol. Therefore, anion-anion halogen bonding is stable and applicable in reality.