Acidity is something that you encounter on a daily basis, probably without even realizing it. The tangy taste of an orange (citric acid), that Vitamin C tablet you took this morning (ascorbic acid), those terrible jeans from the 80’s that you still wear (acid wash). My favourite acid is acetic acid.

Sugar substitutes are gaining more and more relevance due to the health problems associated with the consumption of high amounts of sugar...I thought it would be interesting to take a few of those substitutes and acquire their proton NMR spectrum in our benchtop NMR.

2D NMR experiments provide chemists with evidence to clarify and confirm resonance assignment.  Nowadays every organic chemist uses these experiments called COSY, HMBC and HSQC as routine analytics. Basically, with 2D experiments you correlate some kind of information between two 1D spectra. If we correlate two 1D spectra of the same nucleus we are dealing with homonuclear 2D NMR experiments. The most famous representative of this group is the COSY experiment (find theory here and application here).

Nucleophilic substitution reactions are frequently performed as an experiment in undergraduate organic chemistry courses. Reactions taking place at saturated carbons are mainly classified as SN1 or SN2, where S stands for substitution, N for nucleophilic, and the number indicates the molecularity of the reaction (1 for a unimolecular process, 2 for a bimolecular process). In the SN2 reaction the attack of the nucleophile and elimination of the leaving group occur simultaneously in a concerted process and its rate is proportional to the concentration of both the alkyl halide and the nucleophile.

Sugar substitutes are gaining more and more relevance due to the health problems associated with the consumption of high amounts of sugar...I thought it would be interesting to take a few of those substitutes and acquire their proton NMR spectrum in our benchtop NMR.

Acidity is something that you encounter on a daily basis, probably without even realizing it. The tangy taste of an orange (citric acid), that Vitamin C tablet you took this morning (ascorbic acid), those terrible jeans from the 80’s that you still wear (acid wash). My favourite acid is acetic acid.

The Wittig reaction is a high-yielding, versatile synthetic procedure used to construct carbon-carbon double bonds. Unlike other sp2 bond forming reactions this can be used to provide convenient access to a cis– stereochemistry. At the time the reaction was discovered by Georg Wittig, this cis– confirmation was not reliably afforded by other synthetic means. To …

Sustainability has become a main focus of innovation.  Topics of green chemistry, and renewable feedstocks, are paramount in society today.  Biodiesel is one such example!  Read more.

Incorporation of NMR Spectroscopy into an undergraduate lab provides an excellent method with which to provide students with practical experiments and hands-on experience acquiring

Incorporation of NMR spectroscopy into an undergraduate lab provides an excellent method with which to provide students with practical experiments acquiring their own data and interpreting actual NMR spectra.