Muhammad Adnan Younis obtained his Ph.D. in 2020 from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Currently, he is working as a postdoctoral fellow at Shenzhen University under the guidance of Prof. Tian Bingbing. His primary research interest is the synthesis, characterization, properties, and application of carbon-based materials for environmental and energy applications.
Pyrimidine, an essential constituent of the genetic material of deoxyribonucleic acid, is identified with many biological activities. Based on this, pyrimidine-derived Schiff bases (1-6) of hydroxy-1-naphthaldehyde were synthesized using condensation. In addition, the molecular docking studies against topoisomerase II DNA gyrase, human hematopoietic cell kinase, urate oxidase from Aspergillus flavus, and cyclin-dependent kinase 8 to explore the antibacterial, antioxidant, antifungal, and anticancer properties respectively and binding affinities through bioinformatics approaches to determine the interaction among active molecules with the receptor. Hence, the computational docking analyses identified that all synthesized pyrimidine Schiff bases (1-6) are active and exhibited better binding affinities than the standard drugs. Furthermore, all the prepared materials were characterized by using nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared, and elemental analysis. The phase transition and thermal decomposition temperatures were also determined by differential scanning calorimetry and thermo-gravimetric analysis measurements. Moreover, the X-ray single-crystal diffraction technique also confirmed the structures of pyrimidine-derived Schiff bases 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The pyrimidine-derived Schiff bases 5 possess significant antibacterial, antioxidant, antifungal, and anticancer agent properties, confirming its promising biological activities over standard drugs.