MCAT Organic Chemistry Mechanisms

[admin]

This is it! The Mother of all Organic Chemistry Summaries for the MCAT: available online as of, hmmmm, 3 minutes!

http://www.goldstandard-mcat.com/organic-chemistry-mechanisms/

Soon, I will put links to the Physics and Organic Summaries from your login pages. Just in case you are about to ask, Biology is not amenable to such 2 page summaries. General Chemistry has relatively very few equations to memorize (less than a 1/2 page). Because of time issues, there will be no Gen Chem summary anytime soon. I hope the ORG and PHY summaries will be helpful!

If you are going to print the ORG page, please wait until late tonight so that the final formatting is complete.

[Guest]

Dr. Ferdinand,

On the top, to the right, it has Lithium Aluminum Hydride reacting with a ketone to yield a removal carbonyl oxygen and adding 2H to the carbon.

Shouldn't the product be just a secondary alcohol?

[admin]

Good question!

However, as you know, Lithium Aluminum Hydride is not like the milder reducing agent Sodium Borohydride especially with respect to amides.

I can give you many references. For example, here are a couple:

http://www.chem.ucalgary.ca/courses/351/Carey5th/Ch20/ch20-3-4-2.html

http://designer-drug.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/indoleaceticacid.html

Wow, you did not waste any time!

[matthew]

I've still been thinking about the AlH4 thing and was curious as to if we are required to know this? (Reduction of amides) Searched the 05 manual, couldn't really see anything under my searches. Did I miss something?

[admin]

The AAMC manual mentions oxidation of amides (which I've never seen on a real MCAT) but there is no mention of reduction of amides. So technically, you do not need to commit it to memory.

[admin]

Because those pages are offered to students as a free service from us, we can't allocate additional resources to that right now (formatting those pages with all the math symbols and organic structures takes more time that you would think). However, some printers allow you to resize the page in Print Preview mode. Good luck!