Identify all chiral centers in the isomers that you drew for part (a).

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All right. Hi, everyone. So this question says to mark the chiral centers in the following compound with a star or asterisk. No recall, first and foremost that there are a few criteria that one carbon atom needs the meat before it is considered Cairo, right. Number one, it has to have tetrahedral geometry. And number two, it has to have four different groups attached to it. So if I consider the five carbons inside my cyclen ring, I'm going to go ahead and number the carbon that it contains in my hydroxy group. Number one, whereas the carbon that contains my methyl group is carbon too and so on or actually it may be better to number these inside of the ring. So let me do that. But the numbering scheme stays the same. So when understanding where chiral centers happen to be, it's important to recognize that in line structures like this one on the screen, hydrogens are implied, right? Because this isn't all cane, then all carbons are tetrahedral. And because carbon prefers to have four covalent bonds, then hydrogen is implied to compensate for however many bonds. It appears that carbon is missing in the line structure. So carbon one, for example, on the ring already has three bonds to other atoms, which means that it would have one hydrogen as would carbon too. However, carbons three four and five all have two carbons each because they each have only two bonds to other atoms. So because of this right, carbon 34 and five would not actually be chiral centers because they each have two hydrogen atoms. We cannot say that they are connected to four different groups because Cairo centers due to the fact that they have four different groups, right? Have no plaintiff symmetry and they have no superimposable mirror image. So let's consider carbons one and two. Now carbon one is connected to one oxygen atom, one hydrogen and two carbon atoms. However, the carbon atoms that carbon one is attached to are not actually considered equivalent, they are considered different groups because one of them, in addition to being a a part of the ring structure is connected to a methyl group, whereas the other one is not right. So there's no symmetry in this case. So both carbons would be considered different and therefore carbon one is actually Cairo. So in my structure here, I would label carbon one with a star and now lets consider carbon too, right? Carbon two has one methyl, carbon, one hydrogen and two carbons inside of the rink. However, the two carbons in the cyclops ring are not equivalent either because one of them is connected to an oxygen where the other one is not. So therefore, in this case, there are two chiral carbons present in the molecule, namely on positions one and two and there you have it. So in this case, we have two chiral centers in the following compound. And with that being said, thank you so very much for watching and I hope you found this helpful.

Identify all chiral centers in the isomers that you drew for part (a).

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Key Concepts

Chirality

Chiral Centers

Isomers