Symbiosis between computation and experiment is increasingly evident in pedagogic journals such as J. Chemical Education. Thus an example of original laboratory experiments[cite]10.1021/ed077p271[/cite],[cite]10.1021/ed078p1266[/cite] that later became twinned with a computational counterpart.[cite]10.1021/ed500398e[/cite] So when I spotted this recent lab experiment[cite]10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00566[/cite] I felt another twinning approaching.
Posts Tagged ‘final product’
Organocatalytic cyclopropanation of an enal: (computational) mechanistic understanding.
Saturday, August 25th, 2018Woodward’s symmetry considerations applied to electrocyclic reactions.
Monday, May 20th, 2013Sometimes the originators of seminal theories in chemistry write a personal and anecdotal account of their work. Niels Bohr[cite]10.1007/BF01326955[/cite] was one such and four decades later Robert Woodward wrote “The conservation of orbital symmetry” (Chem. Soc. Special Publications (Aromaticity), 1967, 21, 217-249; it is not online and so no doi can be given). Much interesting chemistry is described there, but (like Bohr in his article), Woodward lists no citations at the end, merely giving attributions by name. Thus the following chemistry (p 236 of this article) is attributed to a Professor Fonken, and goes as follows (excluding the structure in red):
Secrets of a university tutor: unravelling a mechanism using spectroscopy.
Thursday, January 31st, 2013It is always rewarding when one comes across a problem in chemistry that can be solved using a continuous stream of rules and logical inferences from them. The example below[cite]10.1039/P19930000299[/cite] is one I have been using as a tutor in organic chemistry for a few years now, and I share it here. It takes around 50 minutes to unravel with students.
Dynamic effects in nucleophilic substitution at trigonal carbon.
Monday, July 16th, 2012Singleton and co-workers have produced some wonderful work showing how dynamic effects and not just transition states can control the outcome of reactions. Steve Bachrach’s blog contains many examples, including this recent one.
The mechanism of the Baeyer-Villiger rearrangement.
Monday, May 7th, 2012The Baeyer-Villiger rearrangement was named after its discoverers, who in 1899 described the transformation of menthone into the corresponding lactone using Caro’s acid (peroxysulfuric acid). The mechanism is described in all text books of organic chemistry as involving an alkyl migration. Here I take a look at the scheme described by Alvarez-Idaboy, Reyes and Mora-Diez[cite]10.1039/b712608e[/cite], and which may well not yet have made it to all the text books!