3: Ethers, Thiols, and Chirality
- Page ID
- 501390
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- To give ethers common names, simply name the groups attached to the oxygen atom, followed by the generic name ether. If both groups are the same, the group name should be preceded by the prefix di-. Ether molecules have no OH group and thus no intermolecular hydrogen bonding. Ethers therefore have quite low boiling points for a given molar mass. Ether molecules have an oxygen atom and can engage in hydrogen bonding with water molecules. An ether molecule has about the same solubility in water as
- 3.2: Organic Sulfur Compounds
- Thiols, thioethers, and disulfides are common in biological compounds.
- 3.3: Prelude to Conformations and Stereochemistry
- In 1848, a 25 year old chemist named Louis Pasteur made a startling - and some thought brash - claim to the scientific community. Pasteur was inexperienced, to say the least: he had only earned his doctorate the previous year, and had just started his first job as an assistant to a professor at the Ecole normale superieure, a university in Paris.
- 3.4: Chirality and stereoisomers
- We turn now to concept of chirality that formed the basis of the story about Louis Pasteur in the beginning of this chapter. Recall that the term chiral, from the Greek work for 'hand', refers to anything which cannot be superimposed on its own mirror image.
- 3.5: Naming chiral centers- the R and S system
- Chemists need a convenient way to distinguish one stereoisomer from another. The Cahn-Ingold-Prelog system is a set of rules that allows us to unambiguously define the stereochemical configuration of any stereocenter, using the designations 'R ’ (from the Latin rectus, meaning right-handed) or ' S ’ (from the Latin sinister, meaning left-handed).
- 3.6: Compounds with multiple chiral centers
- So far, we have been analyzing compounds with a single chiral center. Next, we turn our attention to those which have multiple chiral centers. We'll start with some stereoisomeric four-carbon sugars with two chiral centers.

