The featured molecules this month are drawn from two papers. The first, “One-Pot Synthesis of 7-Hydroxy-3-carboxycoumarin in Water”, is a Green Chemistry feature by Fringuelli, Piermatti, and Pizzo. The three-dimensional versions of the molecules in the synthesis of the coumarin derivative are directly tied to the reaction scheme included in the paper, opening the possibility of showing large numbers of complex synthetic pathways in this manner.
The second paper is “Determining
the Carbon–Carbon Distance in an Organic Molecule with a Ruler” by
Simoni, Tubino, and Ricchi. This article describes an experiment to determine
the size of a naphthalene molecule, using an extension of classic experiments
for determining molecular size and Avogadro’s number. While the
structure of naphthalene will come as no surprise to most students, the
molecule collection also includes additional polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs) that can be used to introduce students to the environmental and
health issues related to these molecules.
In addition to the static image, two fully manipulable versions (Jmol, MDLChime)
of these molecules appear below. (The Jmol versions may take a
few extra seconds to load, based on the speed of your Internet connection.)
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