Comments

Cyclopentadiene

God results and excellent discussion.

Taxol

Oops. Two errors in your structure. The alkene has an H point down (it should be up) and the 6-ring has a trans ring junction (it should be cis). A bit more QA needed here! Still, you got the 6-ring as a chair and not twist boat.

Regioselective addition

What was your MOPAC method? PM3? RM1? etc. Your superposition does not seem to have worked? Did you optimise this? It is just that the two structures look VERY different?

Your MOs look reasonable, but I would like to see the picture with an orientation that shows if they are symmetric about the plane of symmetry present? The LUMO+2, which should be the C-Cl* orbital, does not look quite like this from the orientation you have shown.

Again, the electrostatic potential is shown from an angle that reveals little about the difference between the two alkenes. The trick is to view it from below, AND to select a threshold for the surface that nicely discriminates between the two alkenes. This is not apparent from your snapshot.

Nice results for the vibrations.

Glycosidation

Here, you have spotted, and commented on the two main conclusions to draw from this expt, namely in your table labelled "Distance between anomeric carbon and acetyl oxygen after MM2 and MOPAC/PM6 optimisation" (could you number the tables so that it is easier to refer to them?). Perhaps another table to list the Burgi-Dunitz angles, which you do nicely discuss in the text.

Spectroscopy

Given your mistakes with taxol, may I presume they were propagated here? You do not include any coordinates, so I cannot tell. But your results look very good, so perhaps the errors were removed (or that they do not influence the spectra!).

Project

Nice one,with lots of good quality and interesting data,and particularly analysis of the individual peaks (and the missing ones). Given that IR is perhaps not particularly diagnostic, there was probably no convincing need to do this! Only do the critical simulations! Nice overall, with a nice collection of references at the end. Well done!