Organic Chemistry Portal
Reactions >> Search, Name Reactions, Protecting Groups, Special Topics

Organic Reactions

Name Reactions

Contains information on the most important Name Reactions and keywords for the field of organic synthesis.


Organic Synthesis Search

A graphical index of bond types provides links to search for specific transformations of interest and locate examples to use in solving synthetic problems.


Protecting Groups

The Protecting Groups list contains stability data for the most important groups. The coverage of current protection and deprotection methods is continously expanded.


Total Syntheses

Total synthesis has its roots in the mid-19th century, primarily as means for confirmation of structures. Today, scale-up and analogue synthesis of recently uncovered biochemically active species is more important.


Special Topics

Flow Chemistry, Green Chemistry, Microwave Synthesis, Multicomponent Reactions, Organocatalysis, Sonochemistry

Important Organic Reactions

Important transformations that every synthetic chemist should know are, on the one hand, named reactions in order to be able to discuss them with colleagues, but also frequently used C-C and C-N coupling reactions, since they occur quite often in synthesis plans. Of course, all these Pd-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions come to mind, but that would diminish the importance of simple 1,2-additions to carbonyl compounds, simple amide couplings, or reductive aminations, which are still used quite often. This means that you should know the chemistry of esters, amides, carbonyls, imines, alcohols, and amines inside out. Anyway, most organic reactions, and simple transformations of already existing functional groups into other functional groups can of course also be quickly researched in databases, but in order to come up with a first synthesis plan, knowledge about some carbon synthons, often used organic reactions and derivatizations or strategies such as "Umpolung" should be memorized, as otherwise a lot of time goes into database search. On the other hand, if you are interested in synthesizing a diverse set of molecules from a common intermediate such as a boronic acid, or using multicomponent reactions, you can also search for a textbook or a review on that topic. The same is of course true for special topics such as heterocycle chemistry or for more exotic functional groups, for which books often offer good introductions.