Comments

Cyclopentadiene

Your energies are spot on. Could make a tiny bit more of kinetic vs thermodynamic control (given you had a lot of it in 2nd year lectures). Diagram? Orbitals?

Taxol

Excellent energies, Did you track down the energies of the "other two chairs" to see if they might be higher or lower?

Hyperstable alkenes. You should try to calculate the heats of hydrogenation for the taxols, and then compare them to eg cyclohexane to see if any conclusions could be drawn.

NMR

I am not sure what you did here? You optimised the geometry using MMFF94s, but then did you calculate the NMR at that geometry, or did you reoptimise the geometry again using QM?

Try to give your tables numbers, so that we can refer to them. Anyway,very nice result for 1.3.2.2 Compound 17, well presented as differences rather than absolute values. But you should show the SIGN of the deviation, since it should be evenly distributed + and -. If they are all the same sign, something has gone wrong with your reference!

1.3.2.5 Compound 17 is a bit anomalous? Your mean deviation for 18 13C was 3.6, and one really should get the same for 17.

Epoxide

Crystal structure

3D diagrams, particularly for the Jacobsen, would help visualise what is going on. Nice analysis of the anomeric effect. You can load the X-ray structure into Jmol very easily; just upload the CIF.

NMR

"All spectra were found to match closely with the literature" A bit more justification of this statement please.

Rotations

"however all OR values are below 100 deg and hence cannot be used to predict absolute configurations." Really? They become less reliable, but your statement is very strong indeed! You should reconsider. You quote literature of "(S),(S) -46.77 (lit. -41.8)". In fact there are quite a number of lit values, and they vary enormously. You did not manage to spot that one!!

TS

Excellent analysis.

QTAIM and NCI

Nicely done

Suggestion

Looks a good one. But did you check that the Shi or Jacobsen catalysts work with tetrasubstituted alkenes? These are tough to epoxidise!