Exploring the maze of cycloserine conformers in the gas phase guided by microwave spectroscopy and quantum chemistry

Cycloserine has in common with isoxazolidines the saturated five-membered ring, which is an important scaffold for drug design, exhibiting diverse biological activities. The most remarkable feature of these compounds is the presence of the N− O bond framed in a cyclic moiety. The lack of an accurate characterization of this structural feature in an isolated system calls for a state-of-the-art theoretical−experimental study. A quantum− chemical investigation of cycloserine unveiled the presence of 11 local energy minima, with only two of them being separated by significant barriers. This picture has been experimentally confirmed: two species have been unequivocally detected in the gas phase by means of laser ablation microwave spectroscopy, also disentangling the complicated hyperfine structure originating from the presence of two nitrogen atoms. A thorough characterization of cycloserine and isoxazolidine, benchmarked by the semiexperimental investigation of hydroxylamine, provided the first accurate determination of their structures and pointed out that the rev-DSD-PBEP86 functional is competitive with respect to explicitly correlated coupled-cluster computations. This outcome paves the way toward accurate studies of large flexible molecules.