Monday, October 6, 2008

transition metal craziness

We're studying transition metal reactions that allow carbon-carbon bond formation in my advanced synthetic organic class (Stille reactions, Suzuki couplings, Heck reactions, pairing Grignards with Ni, basically stuff with copper, palladium, boron, and nickel) and it's cool, but I have a feeling that I'm at a bit of a disadvantage for not having taken inorganic yet. I mean, I know an organic chemist's approach to these mechanisms are very hand-wavy and a "how is this useful for understanding reactions I want to do to make this happen" approach, but I think being used to thinking about metals complexing with ligands and remembering that D orbitals exist would be nice (as a biochem major I'm taking a few core chemistry classes in weird orders because they happen to be at the same time as biology classes...like sophomore inorganic junior year or junior analytical senior year). Ah well, maybe after this spring after I've had inorganic, it will all retroactively make sense. I have a habit of forgetting that there is a periodic table beyond the first couple rows with a few other favorites thrown in, so it's nice to be reminded that there are a lotta elements out there.

3 comments:

Ψ*Ψ said...

I was in the same situation--took synth before inorg and was really confused. The take-home message is that palladium is MAGIC! Synth on paper doesn't require you to know too much about the metals--that can wait until you're in the lab :)
(and you left out the sonogashira coupling! it's my favorite)

Jenn said...

I found that my extensive inorganic background was nearly useless when I took a course on organometallic compounds, particularly in the synthetic organic part of the course where we talked about the reactions you're talking about here. As far as I'm concerned, palladium IS magic.

CB said...

haha, so it is, palladium is magic. I wonder how people think of these reactions.