IUPAC Nomenclature Demystified with a Simple Puzzle-Piece Approach, by Leah Fisch Note from James: This is a guest post by Leah Fisch of Leah4Sci.com , an online resource for learning organic chemistry, MCAT preparation, and other science topics . This is an epic, comprehensive post on organic … [Read more...]
Common Mistakes: Drawing Tetrahedral Carbons
There is a knack to drawing proper tetrahedrons. And some very common pitfalls that might not be immediately obvious. One of the challenges that has faced chemists since the days of Van't Hoff's controversial (for the 1870's!) proposal that carbons attached to four substituents can adopt a … [Read more...]
Don’t Be Futyl, Learn The Butyls
Nomenclature: what a headache. We've got all these accumulated years of jargon regarding chemical structures, and unless you learn the lingo, it can be confusing to follow what's going on. Case in point: butyl. There are FOUR different types of "butyls", and they all have their own name. In … [Read more...]
Hidden Hydrogens, Hidden Lone Pairs, Hidden Counterions
Time is precious. Drawing the full structures of chemical formulae out is a gigantic pain. From a distance, maybe an extra 10-20 seconds here or there might not sound like a lot to you, but you might be surprised by what people will do to shave 5 seconds of boredom off their journey. The point … [Read more...]
Condensed Formulas: Deciphering What the Brackets Mean
Recall that there are at least 4 major ways of representing molecules that you're introduced to in the first week of ochem. The highest level of detail is the Lewis dot structure, which shows where all the electrons are with dots. The second-highest level of detail is the structural formula, … [Read more...]
Table of Functional Group Priorities for Nomenclature
Here's a little nomenclature dilemma. Let's say you're trying to name a molecule. You're familiar with the familiar naming suffixes like -ol, -ene, -ane, -oic acid and so on. But then you come across a molecule which has multiple functional groups. What do you do? What suffix do you give the … [Read more...]
Summary Sheet – Alkane Nomenclature
Part of the problem with nomenclature is that the trivial names can cause a lot of confusion. By themselves, the IUPAC names are at least logical, if sometimes unwieldy - it might be a good plan to just stick to one system as much as possible. I thought it would be worthwhile to put all the … [Read more...]
The Many, Many Ways of Drawing Butane
One of the skills you have to develop early in Org 1 is to learn the different conventions for drawing molecules. Let's use butane as an example. Butane is pretty boring molecule, frankly. It's four carbons in a row. Not much more to it than that. However, even a simple molecule like butane … [Read more...]