The proteins that make up living organisms are huge molecules, but they’re composed of tinier building blocks, known as amino acids. There are over 500 amino acids found in nature, yet, of these, the human genetic code only directly codes for 20. Every protein in your body is made up of some linked combination of these amino acids – this graphic shows the structure of each, as well as giving a little information on the notation used to represent them.
Benzene is a hugely important compound in organic chemistry. It consists of six carbon atoms joined together in a ring, with a hydrogen atom bonded to each carbon; by replacing one or more of these hydrogens with a functional group, a large number of different compounds can be formed. This graphic looks at a selection of the most common simple derivatives which can be obtained in this manner.
We’ve already examined the functional groups that can be present in organic molecules in a previous post; here, we take a look one step further, at heterocycles. Heterocycles are hugely important in organic chemistry – they make up more than half of all known organic compounds. Caffeine is a prime example of an everyday chemical that is composed of heterocycles, as is nicotine, and there are plenty of others in pharmaceuticals and natural products we use on a natural basis. Parts of our DNA are even made up of compounds which contain heterocycles.
In organic chemistry, isomers are molecules with the same molecular formula (i.e. the same number of atoms of each element), but different structural or spatial arrangements of the atoms within the molecule. The reason there are such a colossal number of organic compounds – more than 10 million – is in part down to isomerism. This graphic looks at the 5 main types of isomerism in organic molecules, with a more detailed explanation of each given below, as well as the reason why isomerism is important in our day-to-day lives.
If you’re a chemist, the different types of formulae for organic compounds are all second nature. But if you’re not well-versed in chemistry, all of those lines and letters might well be a bit perplexing. Here’s a brief explanation of what they mean.
To complement the the Organic Reaction Map posted a week or so ago, here’s a reaction map looking at reactions that allow you to vary the substituents on a benzene ring. This was a far larger undertaking than expected; the bulk of the work on the organic reaction map was done in the space of a day, whereas this one is probably pushing towards three days – suffice to say that there were a lot of reactions that could’ve been included!
