The Student Room Group

Chiral Carbons?

Basically I am trying to answer this question in my revision guide which is to show the chiral carbon in limonene, I can't like upload the question but here is a picture of it:




However my one issue is (ignore the fact that this one labels the chiral carbon), if I draw out limonene fully, that carbon doesn't seem chiral to me. It's attached to a carbon, a hydrogen but two of the groups seem to be -CH2. How is this chiral?
The -CH_2 are the same, but further along the chains are different(one has a double bond).
Reply 2
Original post by morgan8002
The -CH_2 are the same, but further along the chains are different(one has a double bond).


How do I know where one ends and the other finishes if they loop back to join eachother?
Original post by Dinasaurus
How do I know where one ends and the other finishes if they loop back to join eachother?


I think the simplest way is to consider each to be the whole loop. If we look at the + limonene, the double bond is before the fork on the clockwise loop and after the fork on the anticlockwise loop.
You could instead only consider them until they join together.
Original post by Dinasaurus
How do I know where one ends and the other finishes if they loop back to join eachother?


Think not in terms of attachments, more in terms of a journey passing through all of the atoms that are attached.

If all of the things that you see on a route are identical then the two routes are the same. But if one gets to a double bond before the other then they must be different.

Quick Reply

Latest