There are a few ways of converting carboxylic acids to esters, and the first one is the direct reaction between the acid and an alcohol. This is known as the Fischer esterification which is a type of addition-elimination reaction of … Read more
Esters are derivatives of carboxylic acids, therefore, to convert an alcohol to an ester, we need to first oxidize it to a carboxylic acid using a strong oxidizing agent such as Na2Cr2O7, CrO3, or KMnO4: We can then … Read more
In this article, we will discuss two strategies for converting alcohols to nitriles: 1) Nitriles via substitution, 2) Nitriles via dehydration. Alcohols to Nitriles via Substitution Reactions To convert an alcohol to a nitrile via substitution, we’ll need to … Read more
Let’s discuss how esters can be converted to aldehydes. In the previous post, we saw that esters can be reduced to primary alcohols using a strong reducing agent such as LiAlH4: Now, we can of course oxidize the … Read more
We know that aldehydes and ketones react with one equivalent of Grignard reagents, producing secondary and tertiary alcohols, respectively. Esters, on the other hand, react with two equivalents of Grignard reagents, producing tertiary alcohols: What happens is we have … Read more
Carboxylic acids can be converted to alcohols using an excess of strong reducing agents such as LiAlH4. The excess reducing agent is needed because first we are going to have a deprotonation of the carboxylic acid, and … Read more
In the previous post, we discussed the methods for converting alkenes to alcohols via Markovnikov and anti-Markovnikov addition of water, the strategies to avoid possible rearrangements when the reactions go through carbocation rearrangements, as well as the indirect addition of … Read more
There are two main strategies we can use to convert alkyl halides to carboxylic acids: 1) Oxidizing the carbon connected to the halogen, 2) Introducing the COOH group, thus increasing the length of the carbon chain: For the … Read more
Reductive amination is used for preparing amines from aldehydes and ketones. All we need is to mix an amine with an aldehyde or ketone in the presence of sodium cyanoborohydride (NaBH3CN) at lower pH levels: So, how does … Read more
We learned in general chemistry that the oxidation state is determined based on the number of bonds connecting elements with different electronegativities. Very often, though, we didn’t need/bother to look at the number of bonds, but simply used a formula … Read more
