Talk:Mod:Sabrina

Cpd dimers: Good to see you analysing the energies in terms of structural effects, but do you really think this is the origin of the kinetic control observed?

Taxol: Will the relative energies of the structures give you insight into which product is formed faster? Maybe just poor wording but this does not demonstrate a strong understanding of kinetic/thermodynamic control. Why assume that the twist-boat does not exist? Try to model it, see if it does. And what happened to the boat conformation? The thermodynamic product of a reaction can also be the kinetic product! Read up on this! Good to see you investigating the differences between MM2 and MMFF94. Very good discussion of hyperstable alkenes.

Carbene: You shouldn’t have to explain the meaning of syn, knowledge of its meaning should be assumed. You also don’t really need to explain the processes you went through to run a file on SCAN (think of this as an organic paper, this info would be kept to the experimental or SI unless it was vital to the understanding of the discussion). Very good discussion otherwise.

Glycosidation: Very good discussion on choice of protecting group and the differences between MM2 and MOPAC. Very good discussions all round in fact, taking into account the differences mentioned above and the burgi-dunitz angle.

Mini-project: I’m glad you chose your own project. A discussion (and arrows) of the reaction mechanism would have been nice. Excellent observation of the differences in planarity at the nitrogen. An excellent, well presented (and reader friendly) analysis of your NMR results. But shy didn’t you simply renumber the atoms yourself so they made more sense? Eugh, Hartrees? Why suddenly use them when you’ve been on kcal mol-1 for the rest of your document? You generally use IR to identify particular functional groups, therefore I imagine it would actually be quite useful in real life to determine between the two isomers.

Overall: The whole thing got better the more I read. One of the better mini-projects I’ve read in a while, it read like you actually engaged with and thought about what you were doing, and an excellent attempt overall. Although it’s a pity about the first couple of sections, you certainly have it in you to have done a better job on them. Make sure to read up on kinetic/thermodynamic control!