Chemical Formulae

[prospero]

If you get involved with Research Chemicals it eventually becomes pretty much obligatory to have an understanding of the chemical formulae. With no background in chemistry I'm making reasonable progress in this, but there are a few minor questions which are bugging me andI wondered if you guys could help me out.


1) Shulgin seems to classify the 2C series according to the rule:


2C-X= 2,5-Dimethoxy-4,XXXXX phenethylamine


EXCEPT for


2C-B which is 4-bromo-2, 5-Dimethoxy phenethylamine


Why does helistthe 2C-B formula differently - he's normally pretty rigorous in these things?


2) Why is 2,5-Dimethoxy-4, methylphenethylamine called 2C-D and not 2C-M?


3) Other people completely re-order the components of the formulae of certain substances. eg I've seen 2C-D listed as 2-(4-methyl-2,5-dimethoxyphenyl)ethylamine (which incidentally also seems to havean extra '2' in it). Why is it acceptable to do this?


I'm slowly getting to grips with the names of these things but any help on the above queries would be great.

[JewishNazi]

1) when it comes to naming, it is meant to be in alphabetical order. As
you know, B comes before D in that alphabet, therefore it would be
listed fist. This should also be true for 2C-C.



2)Not a clue, but i would speculate it is because he has, B, C, E, F,
G, H, I, and I think J. It just seems to be 'cooler' to have them all
lined up in the alphabet rather than most of a line and, jump forward,
M. Read the commentary at the end of DOC, he starts joking about that
kind of stuff



3) If you look at how it is written other times, the amine is on '2'
and the substitued phenyl is on '1'. They have just simply swaped them
around. it is still the sme thing because there are only 2 carbons in
an ethyl chain. The real problem is if they did it with an amphetamine
(propyl instead of ethyl)

[allyourbase]

those extra markings et cetera are the carbons. organic chems being primarily carbons it would be highly inefficient to list every single occurance of a carbon within a particular molecule.Edited by: allyourbase

[fastandbulbous]

There are IUPAC rules that should be followed in the strict naming of organic compounds, but ther's more than one way of naming the same compound, by using different parts of the structure as the basis onto which all the other groups are added (and not following the aphabetic order rule)





A language example is:


The cat sat on the mat is the usually accepted form of that phrase, but you can think of loads of other ways of saying it, yet conveying the same idea (eg. On the mat, the cat sat)