I was flicking through the paper looking for some easy answer questions when I saw a chiral centre one where you had to circle the chiral carbon. Awesome. Chiral carbons have four different groups attached to them, and this means that they can have mirror image molecules (or optical isomers OR enantiomers... just too much choice)
Then I looked at the name of the compound: carvone.
This rang a bell in my head and all of a sudden I realised that I had studied carvone before, so I read the paragraph at the top of the page and it turned out that the whole of section C was on perfume chemistry... score.
If you haven't read, I did a whole research essay on perfume molecule synthesis.
So the two enantiomers of carvone looks like this:
One optical isomer smells of spearmint, where the other smells of caraway. It's all to do with the way that our olfactory nerves in our nose receive the shape of the molecule. It's actually pretty cool (in a nerdy way).
The page I turn over next has a picture of limonene!!! I mean that's my second favourite perfume molecule (mainly because it usually comes in pairs with linalool which just sounds plain funny).
Anyway it said in the exam paper that when carvone is reduced it makes limonene, and I was like oh yeah cos they synthesise carvone from limonene in industry, it's cool how it goes from smelling of citrus to smelling of mint and caraway.
Anyway I loved the fact it was all about perfume and sat grinning at the paper for a few minutes. After the exam everyone (the other 9 chem students) were like "omg steph, I totally thought of you on that last section!"
Just thought I'd share my exciting exam news. And now I am finished until October. Yes.
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