pK₅₀─A Rigorous Indicator of Individual Functional Group Acidity/Basicity in Multiprotic Compounds

High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide In this work, we show that the apparent p K a measured by standard titration experiments is an insufficient measure of acidity or basicity of organic functional groups in multiprotic compounds─a frequent aspect of lead optimization in pharmaceutical research. We show that the use of the apparent p K a in this context may result in costly mistakes. To properly represent the group’s true acidity/basicity, we propose p K 50 ─a single-proton midpoint measure derived from a statistical thermodynamics treatment of multiprotic ionization. We show that p K 50, which may be directly measured in specialized NMR titration experiments, is superior in tracking the functional group’s acidity/basicity across congeneric series of related compounds and converges to the well familiar ionization constant in the monoprotic case.