Notes on last week of lectures: 19 and 20

Retrosynthetic analysis: being given a product and working almost backwards to produce reaction steps.

Steps to go through:

• Put a wiggly line through the product, which creates your synthons. Think of recognisable reagents that would make up the synthons. Start with those reactants and create your reaction steps to end up at your target molecule.

• You can do functional group interconversion - FGI where you transform one functional group into another. Example: transforming carboxylic acid group into an ester group when using strong bases when we want to avoid deprotonation of the carboxylic acid group.

• Look for 1,3 disconnections. This is when you have 2 functional groups 3 bonds apart. This is a good place to put your wiggly line.

• Also look out for 1,5 disconnections - exactly the same as above.

• Although you are given the starting material, start at the target molecule so you are less likely to go wrong.

• You won’t have to come up with specific solvents as reagents but should known when a reaction is acid-catalysed.