Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms. Study of structure determines their structural formula. Study of properties includes physical and chemical properties, and evaluation of chemical reactivity to understand their behavior. The study of organic reactions includes the chemical synthesis of natural products, drugs, and polymers, and study of individual organic molecules in the laboratory and via theoretical study.
The range of chemicals studied chemistry includes hydrocarbons as well as compounds based on carbon, but also containing other elements, especially oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus and the halogens. Organometallic chemistry is the study of compounds containing carbon–metal bonds.
Organic compounds form the basis of all earthly life and constitute the majority of known chemicals. The bonding patterns of carbon, with its valence of four—formal single, double, and triple bonds, plus structures with delocalized electrons—make the array of organic compounds structurally diverse, and their range of applications enormous. They form the basis of, or are constituents of, many commercial products including pharmaceuticals; petrochemicals and agrichemicals, and products made from them including lubricants, solvents; plastics; fuels and explosives. The study of organic chemistry overlaps organometallic chemistry and biochemistry, but also with medicinal chemistry, polymer chemistry, and materials science.
Educational aspects
Organic chemistry is typically taught at the college or university level. It is considered a very challenging course but has also been made accessible to students.History
Before the 18th century, chemists generally believed that compounds obtained from living organisms were endowed with a vital force that distinguished them from inorganic compounds. According to the concept of vitalism, organic matter was endowed with a "vital force". During the first half of the nineteenth century, some of the first systematic studies of organic compounds were reported. Around 1816 Michel Chevreul started a study of soaps made from various fats and alkalis. He separated the acids that, in combination with the alkali, produced the soap. Since these were all individual compounds, he demonstrated that it was possible to make a chemical change in various fats, producing new compounds, without "vital force". In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler produced the organic chemical urea, a constituent of urine, from inorganic starting materials, in what is now called the Wöhler synthesis. Although Wöhler himself was cautious about claiming he had disproved vitalism, this was the first time a substance thought to be organic was synthesized in the laboratory without biological starting materials. The event is now generally accepted as indeed disproving the doctrine of vitalism.After Wöhler, Justus von Liebig worked on the organization of organic chemistry, being considered one of its principal founders.
In 1856, William Henry Perkin, while trying to manufacture quinine, accidentally produced the organic dye now known as Perkin's mauve. His discovery, made widely known through its financial success, greatly increased interest in organic chemistry.
A crucial breakthrough for organic chemistry was the concept of chemical structure, developed independently in 1858 by both Friedrich August Kekulé and Archibald Scott Couper. Both researchers suggested that tetravalent carbon atoms could link to each other to form a carbon lattice, and that the detailed patterns of atomic bonding could be discerned by skillful interpretations of appropriate chemical reactions.
The era of the pharmaceutical industry began in the last decade of the 19th century when the German company, Bayer, first manufactured acetylsalicylic acid—more commonly known as aspirin. By 1910 Paul Ehrlich and his laboratory group began developing arsenic-based arsphenamine as the first effective medicinal treatment of syphilis, and thereby initiated the medical practice of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularized the concepts of "magic bullet" drugs and of systematically improving drug therapies. His laboratory made decisive contributions to developing antiserum for diphtheria and standardizing therapeutic serums.
File:Cefalotin.svg|thumb|Cefalotin is a widely used synthetic antibiotic.
Early examples of organic reactions and applications were often found because of a combination of luck and preparation for unexpected observations. The latter half of the 19th century however witnessed systematic studies of organic compounds. The development of synthetic indigo is illustrative. The production of indigo from plant sources dropped from 19,000 tons in 1897 to 1,000 tons by 1914 thanks to the synthetic methods developed by Adolf von Baeyer. In 2002, 17,000 tons of synthetic indigo were produced from petrochemicals.
In the early part of the 20th century, polymers and enzymes were shown to be large organic molecules, and petroleum was shown to be of biological origin.
The multiple-step synthesis of complex organic compounds is called total synthesis. Total synthesis of complex natural compounds increased in complexity to glucose and terpineol. For example, cholesterol-related compounds have opened ways to synthesize complex human hormones and their modified derivatives. Since the start of the 20th century, complexity of total syntheses has been increased to include molecules of high complexity such as lysergic acid and vitamin B12.
image:Cyanocobalamin.svg|thumb|left|230px|The total synthesis of vitamin B12 marked a major achievement in organic chemistry.
The discovery of petroleum and the development of the petrochemical industry spurred the development of organic chemistry. Converting individual petroleum compounds into types of compounds by various chemical processes led to organic reactions enabling a broad range of industrial and commercial products including, among others: plastics, synthetic rubber, organic adhesives, and various property-modifying petroleum additives and catalysts.
The majority of chemical compounds occurring in biological organisms are carbon compounds, so the association between organic chemistry and biochemistry is so close that biochemistry might be regarded as in essence a branch of organic chemistry. Although the history of biochemistry might be taken to span some four centuries, fundamental understanding of the field only began to develop in the late 19th century and the actual term biochemistry was coined around the start of 20th century. Research in the field increased throughout the twentieth century, without any indication of slackening in the rate of increase, as may be verified by inspection of abstraction and indexing services such as BIOSIS Previews and Biological Abstracts, which began in the 1920s as a single annual volume, but has grown so drastically that by the end of the 20th century it was only available to the everyday user as an online electronic database.
Characterization
Since organic compounds often exist as mixtures, a variety of techniques have also been developed to assess purity; chromatography techniques are especially important for this application, and include HPLC and gas chromatography. Traditional methods of separation include distillation, crystallization, evaporation, magnetic separation and solvent extraction.Organic compounds were traditionally characterized by a variety of chemical tests, called "wet methods", but such tests have been largely displaced by spectroscopic or other computer-intensive methods of analysis. Listed in approximate order of utility, the chief analytical methods are:
- Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is the most commonly used technique, often permitting the complete assignment of atom connectivity and even stereochemistry using correlation spectroscopy. The principal constituent atoms of organic chemistry – hydrogen and carbon – exist naturally with NMR-responsive isotopes, respectively 1H and 13C.
- Elemental analysis: A destructive method used to determine the elemental composition of a molecule. See also mass spectrometry, below.
- Mass spectrometry indicates the molecular weight of a compound and, from the fragmentation patterns, its structure. High-resolution mass spectrometry can usually identify the exact formula of a compound and is used in place of elemental analysis. In former times, mass spectrometry was restricted to neutral molecules exhibiting some volatility, but advanced ionization techniques allow one to obtain the "mass spec" of virtually any organic compound.
- Crystallography can be useful for determining molecular geometry when a single crystal of the material is available. Highly efficient hardware and software allows a structure to be determined within hours of obtaining a suitable crystal.