Cardiolipin, a compound found in heart muscle, has the following structure. What products are formed if all ester bonds in the molecule are saponified by treatment with aqueous NaOH?

Question

Structural representation of cardiolipin, highlighting its ester bonds and potential products from saponification with NaOH.

Accepted Answer

Welcome back everyone. Bi tooth, we bi sterol oxy propal phosphate undergoes saponification with aqueous potassium hydroxide. If all the er bonds in the molecule are broken, what products are formed? So essentially we're given the structure and we're interested in the products of a saponification reaction. What we're going to do is first of all identify the glycerol fragments because we know that saponification reaction allows us to produce glycerol and carboxylate salts. So we noticed that we have two Glycerol fragments, we're going to break the phosphorus oxygen bonds and also the oxygen carbon bonds. So this really lee says two molecules of glycerol per unit of the given structure. We can draw the structure of Glycerol. Let's recall that Glycerol has we hydroxyl groups. So each oxygen gets hydrogen, right? And we essentially release two of those. Now, what else are we forming? Well, we notice that we are given phosphate at the very center, right. So essentially upon hydrolysis, we're going to produce phosphate which has one double bonded oxygen and three single bonded oxygen atoms. And those single bonded oxygens have negative charges. As we understand, we need we potassium CS to balance out the negative charge for each oxygen. Well done. We have our next product and now we can notice that there are the carboxylate souls. And what we notice is that four of them are exactly the sa me, they have the SA me number of carbon atoms. So what we're going to do is simply draw carboxyl starting with Car Bono, let's add oxygen with a negative charge. We need to add potassium CS to balance those negative charges. And the cy chain has 16 CH two units followed by CH three because we initially had four of those as side chains, we're going to produce four of them, right? So we have determined the products for this reaction. Let's label those as the final answer to this problem. Thank you for watching.

Cardiolipin, a compound found in heart muscle, has the following structure. What products are formed if all ester bonds in the molecule are saponified by treatment with aqueous NaOH?

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Key Concepts

Saponification

Cardiolipin Structure

Aqueous NaOH