The following outline acts as an overview of and topical guide to chemistry:
In organic chemistry, a functional group is a substituent or moiety in a molecule that causes the molecule's characteristic chemical reactions. The same functional group will undergo the same or similar chemical reactions regardless of the rest of the molecule's composition. This enables systematic prediction of chemical reactions and behavior of chemical compounds and the design of chemical synthesis. The reactivity of a functional group can be modified by other functional groups nearby. Functional group interconversion can be used in retrosynthetic analysis to plan organic synthesis.
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms. Study of structure determines their structural formula. Study of properties includes physical and chemical properties, and evaluation of chemical reactivity to understand their behavior. The study of organic reactions includes the chemical synthesis of natural products, drugs, and polymers, and study of individual organic molecules in the laboratory and via theoretical study.
Combinatorial chemistry comprises chemical synthetic methods that make it possible to prepare a large number of compounds in a single process. These compound libraries can be made as mixtures, sets of individual compounds or chemical structures generated by computer software. Combinatorial chemistry can be used for the synthesis of small molecules and for peptides.
Chemical synthesis is the artificial execution of chemical reactions to obtain one or several products. This occurs by physical and chemical manipulations usually involving one or more reactions. In modern laboratory uses, the process is reproducible and reliable.
Synthesis or synthesize may refer to:
A chemical database is a database specifically designed to store chemical information. This information is about chemical and crystal structures, spectra, reactions and syntheses, and thermophysical data.
Total synthesis, a specialized area within organic chemistry, focuses on constructing complex organic compounds, especially those found in nature, using laboratory methods. It often involves synthesizing natural products from basic, commercially available starting materials. Total synthesis targets can also be organometallic or inorganic. While total synthesis aims for complete construction from simple starting materials, modifying or partially synthesizing these compounds is known as semisynthesis.
Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and development of new chemical entities suitable for therapeutic use. It also includes the study of existing drugs, their biological properties, and their quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR).
Organic synthesis is a branch of chemical synthesis concerned with the construction of organic compounds. Organic compounds are molecules consisting of combinations of covalently-linked hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms. Within the general subject of organic synthesis, there are many different types of synthetic routes that can be completed including total synthesis, stereoselective synthesis, automated synthesis, and many more. Additionally, in understanding organic synthesis it is necessary to be familiar with the methodology, techniques, and applications of the subject.
Retrosynthetic analysis is a technique for solving problems in the planning of organic syntheses. This is achieved by transforming a target molecule into simpler precursor structures regardless of any potential reactivity/interaction with reagents. Each precursor material is examined using the same method. This procedure is repeated until simple or commercially available structures are reached. These simpler/commercially available compounds can be used to form a synthesis of the target molecule. E.J. Corey formalized this concept in his book The Logic of Chemical Synthesis.
In retrosynthetic analysis, a synthon is a hypothetical unit within a target molecule that represents a potential starting reagent in the retroactive synthesis of that target molecule. The term was coined in 1967 by E. J. Corey. He noted in 1988 that the "word synthon has now come to be used to mean synthetic building block rather than retrosynthetic fragmentation structures". It was noted in 1998 that the phrase did not feature very prominently in Corey's 1981 book The Logic of Chemical Synthesis, as it was not included in the index. Because synthons are charged, when placed into a synthesis an uncharged form is found commercially instead of forming and using the potentially very unstable charged synthons.
In organic chemistry, umpolung or polarity inversion is the chemical modification of a functional group with the aim of the reversal of polarity of that group. This modification allows secondary reactions of this functional group that would otherwise not be possible. The concept was introduced by D. Seebach and E.J. Corey. Polarity analysis during retrosynthetic analysis tells a chemist when umpolung tactics are required to synthesize a target molecule.
ChemSpider is a freely accessible online database of chemicals owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It contains information on more than 100 million molecules from over 270 data sources, each of them receiving a unique identifier called ChemSpider Identifier.
Physical organic chemistry, a term coined by Louis Hammett in 1940, refers to a discipline of organic chemistry that focuses on the relationship between chemical structures and reactivity, in particular, applying experimental tools of physical chemistry to the study of organic molecules. Specific focal points of study include the rates of organic reactions, the relative chemical stabilities of the starting materials, reactive intermediates, transition states, and products of chemical reactions, and non-covalent aspects of solvation and molecular interactions that influence chemical reactivity. Such studies provide theoretical and practical frameworks to understand how changes in structure in solution or solid-state contexts impact reaction mechanism and rate for each organic reaction of interest.
DNA-encoded chemical libraries (DECL) is a technology for the synthesis and screening on an unprecedented scale of collections of small molecule compounds. DECL is used in medicinal chemistry to bridge the fields of combinatorial chemistry and molecular biology. The aim of DECL technology is to accelerate the drug discovery process and in particular early phase discovery activities such as target validation and hit identification.
Reaxys is a web-based tool for the retrieval of information about chemical compounds and data from published literature, including journals and patents. The information includes chemical compounds, chemical reactions, chemical properties, related bibliographic data, substance data with synthesis planning information, as well as experimental procedures from selected journals and patents. It is licensed by Elsevier.
Chematica is a software that uses algorithms and a collective database to predict synthesis pathways for molecules. The software development, led by Bartosz A. Grzybowski, was publicized in August 2012. In 2017, the software and database were wholly purchased by Merck KGaA | MRK. Since the acquisition, the software has been made commercially available as Synthia.
Automated synthesis or automatic synthesis is a set of techniques that use robotic equipment to perform chemical synthesis in an automated way. Automating processes allows for higher efficiency and product quality although automation technology can be cost-prohibitive and there are concerns regarding overdependence and job displacement. Chemical processes were automated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, with major developments happening in the previous thirty years, as technology advanced. Tasks that are performed may include: synthesis in variety of different conditions, sample preparation, purification, and extractions. Applications of automated synthesis are found on research and industrial scales in a wide variety of fields including polymers, personal care, and radiosynthesis.
A chemical graph generator is a software package to generate computer representations of chemical structures adhering to certain boundary conditions. The development of such software packages is a research topic of cheminformatics. Chemical graph generators are used in areas such as virtual library generation in drug design, in molecular design with specified properties, called inverse QSAR/QSPR, as well as in organic synthesis design, retrosynthesis or in systems for computer-assisted structure elucidation (CASE). CASE systems again have regained interest for the structure elucidation of unknowns in computational metabolomics, a current area of computational biology.
