Context-Driven Exploration of Complex Chemical Reaction Networks

The construction of a reaction network containing all relevant intermediates and elementary reactions is necessary for the accurate description of chemical processes. In the case of a complex chemical reaction (involving, for instance, many reactants or highly reactive species), the size of such network may grow rapidly. Here, we present a computational protocol that constructs such reaction networks in a fully automated fashion steered in an intuitive, graph-based fashion through a single graphical user interface. Starting from a set of initial reagents new intermediates are explored through intra- and intermolecular reactions of already explored intermediates or new reactants presented to the network. This is done by assembling reactive complexes based on heuristic rules derived from conceptual electronic-structure theory and exploring the corresponding approximate reaction path. A subsequent path refinement leads to a minimum-energy path which connects the new intermediate to the existing ones to form ...