comments

Cyclopentadiene

Lots of nice diagrams and discussion. Excellent!

Taxol

OOps. Your compound 10 has a trans bridgehead junction; it should of course be cis. So you cannot compare 9 and 10.

Regarding hyperstability, you could quote the hydrogenation energy to show it is eg greater or less than eg cyclohexene (the yardstick).

Diene

Nice overlay,and nice discussion. Not sure that electronegativity is the only explanation. simple overlaps are the dominant effect to tease out.

You ran out of steam regarding analysis of the IR?

Glycosidation

Lots of energies for you to get to grips with. It can all be boiled down to noticing that A/B are the SAME for MOPAV/PM6 but DIFFERENT using MM2. Likewise C/D, but NOT A*/B* etc.

In this regard, I am surprised that your A/C/B/D energies are ALL identical? I think whilst A and B should be the same, A and C should be different?

Of course this is explained because MOPAC forms a bond in A to make it the same as B, but this cannot happen with MM2.

Project.

Table 7 looks odd in placea? 218.28 vs 148.72? The results can be presented more clearly, as a bar diagram (see article by Braddock and Rzepa).

Nice project you have selected. But again the results can be presented much more concisely, just show the difference between calc and expt for your two isomers (highlighting any outliers). Thus it is difficult to take this data from eg the caption to figure 33.

What you should get is a good match to eg 13C, except for the C attached to I, which should be out by around 50ppm (due to spin orbit coupling). I am not sure this comes over from your analysis.

Pretty good overall. Well done.