The CDK data model supports more than just the chemical graph. We have seen atoms and bonds earlier, the bonds being atoms sharing electrons. Atoms, however, can also have electrons in the valence shell not involved in bond: free electon (lone) pairs, and unpaired electrons as found in radicals.
But before we look at how we add paired and unpaired electrons, we should first look at the two principle classes involved in representing these concepts. Like bonds, a free electron pair and a unpaired electron are bound to the atom. Depending on the theory used, the exact environment which holds the electrons can be named differently. For example, they might be referred to as orbitals, atomic or molecular. The CDK simply refers to the holder as IElectronContainers, and has several subinterfaces for bonds (IBond), lone pairs (ILonePair), and unpaired electrons (ISingleElectron), as shown in Figure ecInheritance.
Oxygens are atoms with lone pairs: the free electrons that do not take part in a bond. These lone pairs can be explicitly modeled in the CDK. For example, this is how we can represent water:
LonePairOxygen
And we can the count the number of lone pair on each atom with, for example, this code:
LonePairCount
which gives us:
LonePairCount
An unpaired electron on an atom makes that atom a radical. Radicals are common mass spectroscopy and as the latter is an important use case of the CDK, unpaired electrons are well-supported in the data model.
We can add an unpaired electron with the addSingleElectron
method of the IAtomContainer class.
HydrogenRadical