Derek Lowe has a recent post entitled " Another Funny-Looking Structure Comes Through ". He cites a recent medchem article[cite]10.1021/acsmedchemlett.5b00398[/cite] in which the following acetal sub-structure appears in a promising drug candidate (blue component below). His point is that orally taken drugs have to survive acid (green below) encountered in the stomach, and acetals are famously sensitive to hydrolysis (red below). But if

Steve Bachrach on his own blog has commented on a recent article[cite]10.1002/anie.201505934[/cite] discussing the structure of the trimer of fluoroethanol. Rather than the expected triangular form with three OH—O hydrogen bonds, the lowest energy form only had two such bonds, but it matched the microwave data much better. Here I explore this a bit more.

I have previously shown the grave of  William Perkin, a great british organic chemist. On a recent visit to  Paris, I went to see the crypt in the Panthéon, the great french secular necropolis. What a contrast to Perkin!

In Jingdezhen an Imperial Kiln was built in 1369 to produce porcelain that was “white as jade, thin as paper, bright as a mirror and tuneful as a bell”. It’s the colours of the glazes that caught my eye, achieved by a combination of oxidative and reductive firing in the kiln, coupled with exquisite control […]

This comes to you from China, and the city of Suzhou. To set the scene, cities in China have a lot of motorbikes. Electric ones. With their own speed units, a % of Panda speed.

A fascinating re-examination has appeared of a reaction first published in 1960 by Wittig and then repudiated by him in 1964 since it could not be replicated by a later student.

How does an anaesthetic work?

Previously, I explored deviation from ideal tetrahedral arrangements of four carbon ligands around a central (sp3) carbon using crystal structures. Now it is the turn of digonal (sp1) and trigonal (sp2) carbons.

An article entitled "Four Decades of the Chemistry of Planar Hypercoordinate Compounds" was recently reviewed by Steve Bacharach on his blog, where you can also see comments.

The previous post explored the structural features of amides. Here I compare the analysis with that for the closely related thioamides.

The π-resonance in amides famously helped Pauling to his proposal of a helical structure for proteins. Here I explore some geometric properties of amides related to the C-N bond and the torsions about it.