Fundamentals of Organic Chemistry II

Catalog description

Introduction to organic chemistry, with emphasis on the identification of organic compounds by characteristic chemical reactions and by spectroscopy. The course involves both lecture and laboratory. Because of duplication of subject matter, students may not receive credit for both CHEM 203 and CHEM 213 . CHEM 203 CHEM 203 Fundamentals of Organic Chemistry II (3) CHEM 203 is a one-semester organic chemistry course that has both lecture and laboratory components. The lecture introduces students to the basic theory and application (structure determination) of different types of spectroscopy (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy) and mass spectrometry. Certain chemical reactions learned in CHEM 202 will be reviewed along with the mechanistic details of some of these processes. Special topics such as drug discovery, natural product isolation, and synthesis will be surveyed. The laboratory teaches students the fundamental techniques used by organic chemists such as recrystallization, melting point determination, distillation, extraction, thin-layer chromatography, and column chromatography. Mastery of these basic techniques lays the foundation for carrying out organic syntheses and/or natural product isolations. Students are given hands-on access to instrumentation for the characterization of synthetic products or organic unknowns using standard analysis methods such as IR, NMR, UV/V is spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, polarimetry, HPLC, GC and GC-MS. Students are responsible for writing laboratory reports for all experiments.