You probably don’t want me designing your house. I can’t look at floorplans and ‘see’ what the finished building will be like. Similarly, when it came to understanding molecules in 3D, I wasn’t a natural. I particularly remember being bad at Newman projections! And yet, as a research organic chemist, my specialty was stereochemistry. How…
How to Draw Neat Organic Chemistry Structures? There’s a lot of students that I talk to who are interested in hexagon graph paper as templates that will help them draw better organic chemistry shapes. Particularly hexagons like for benzene or chair cyclohexanes when you get to chair conformations. There are two options: 1) Benznote – available online…
I loved playing with Lego when I was a young boy and I don’t think it is an over-statement to say that the love of building more complicated constructions from simple Lego building blocks led, at least in part, to me becoming an organic chemist! It struck me, recently, that Lego minifigures could be used…
The good-old-fashioned chemistry set. I’ve loved science, and chemistry in particular, since I was a little boy, and some of my fondest memories are of experimenting with my chemistry set. And now, as a father of three curious little scientists, I’ve searched for something similar! So, how does the new breed of chemistry set on…
One of the most common questions in organic chemistry is ‘which of these two compounds is more acidic?’ Here are the 4 most important factors to consider. How to determine the stronger acid In Organic Chemistry, acids and bases is really quite qualitative. We’re often looking at whether a compound is even acidic or basic at all….
Esters are such a ubiquitous and important functional group, and they’re often one of the first to be encountered in preparative chemistry labs, since they are so readily formed. Hot on the heels of his recent Acetals and Ketals Functional Group Spotlight, MedChemProf has returned to the world of carboxylic acid derivatives with this overview of…
Acetals and Ketals have a special place in my OChem-loving heart! Not least because I spent most of my PhD trying to make spiroacetal structures that were part of a natural product called spongistatin. In fact, I like them so much that my last major research project before leaving academia was about trying to synthesize spiroacetals…
I’m SO excited by today’s post! I’ve brought onboard McKenna, who runs the gorgeous and hugely popular instagram account @magnolia_med, documenting her pre-med study journey. McKenna shares her secrets for how to study organic chemistry – how she turned a 65 into an A in Organic Chemistry, and her top tips for the ACS final exam! How I…
Amides are one of the most important functional groups in Organic Chemistry. They’re ubiquitous in biology and medicine and understanding their structure and properties is vital to understanding what gives proteins their shapes. Here with a special guest Spotlight on Amides is MedChemProf, an Associate Professor in a School of Pharmacy, with strong interest in…
Once you’ve mastered the art of drawing chair conformations, it’s time to stick some axial and equatorial substituents on those beautiful chairs. In marking thousands of exam papers, there’s 2 mistakes that I’ve seen over and over again. Here’s how to avoid those mistakes ace any chair conformations in your OChem exams. The 2 biggest mistakes…
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