Low-temperature polymorphic transformation of β-lactam antibiotics

Polymorphic screening and transformation of molecular crystals are presently popular research areas in pharmaceutical studies. In this study, we developed an ab initio method to examine the structures, spectra, and stabilities of β-lactam (trans-13-azabicyclo[10.2.0]tetradecan-14-one), an important component of antibiotics. Based on the density functional theory (DFT) and second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation (MP2) methods, the present work demonstrated that forms I and II have isomorphic structures but can be distinguished by their Gibbs free energies and vibrational spectra. Forms I and II show a low-temperature polymorphic transformation at 308 K, where form I is stable below 308 K and form II is stable above 308 K. The proposed method suggests that the theoretical calculation can be used as a tool to effectively distinguish the isomorphic structures, and temperature-induced polymorphic transformation has far-reaching significance for drug storage and design.