Chemical Sciences

Detecting anomeric effects in tetrahedral boron bearing four oxygen substituents.

https://doi.org/10.59350/dybzk-cs537
Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog

In an earlier post, I discussed[1] a phenomenon known as the “anomeric effect” exhibited by tetrahedral carbon compounds with four C-O bonds. Each oxygen itself bears two bonds and has two lone pairs, and either of these can align with one of three other C-O bonds to generate an anomeric effect. Here I change the central carbon to a boron to explore what happens, as indeed I promised earlier.

References

Chemical sciences

Detecting anomeric effects in tetrahedral carbon bearing four oxygen substituents.

https://doi.org/10.59350/dfkt5-k2b20
Published

I have written a few times about the so-called “anomeric effect”, which relates to stereoelectronic interactions in molecules such as sugars bearing a tetrahedral carbon atom with at least two oxygen substituents. The effect can be detected when the two C-O bond lengths in such molecules are inspected, most obviously when one of these bonds has a very different length from the other.