Wow! This spring semester is almost over and this is the last blog you’ll be seeing from me, well dealing with Organic Chemistry anyway. The blog assignment for blog #10 was to search for a publication article from Christina White’s, “White Lab.” Christina White is a chemist with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illionois Urbana-Champaign.
The article I found that involved a topic that we had discussed in Organic Chemistry II was, “A General and Highly Selective Chelate-Controlled Intermolecular Oxidative Heck Reaction.” The Heck Reaction is a chemical reaction where an unsaturated halide reacts with an alkene, a base, and a palladium catalyst to form a substituted alkene.1 The intermolecular Heck reaction is unique among cross-coupling reactions due to the direct formation of C-C bonds from vinylic C-H bonds of α-olefins.2 An olefin, another name for alkene, is an unsaturated chemical compound containing at least one carbon-to-carbon double bond.3
Below is the general scheme for a Heck Reaction:
Below is Dr. White’s reaction scheme for this publication where the Heck Reaction occurs in the first step of the reaction.
It’s hard to believe Organic Chemistry has come to an end. I hope everyone has enjoyed reading my blog posts. Good luck to the lucky individuals enrolled in Organic I in the Fall J.
References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_reaction
2. http://www.scs.illinois.edu/white/pubs/pub11.pdf
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olefin
