The organic molecules that make up life on Earth are more than just the 2-D structures we’ve been drawing so far. Molecules have 3-D shapes that help us understand what they can do. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn how orbital hybridization and valence bond theory can help us explain 3D molecular structures and about constitutional and geometric isomers.

Acidity is a tricky concept, and it’s not always like how we see it in the movies. As organic chemists, we need to know how to predict the strength of weak acids and bases. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn four key factors that we can use to predict relative acidity. This important tool will help us us to predict the products of chemical reactions.

What comes to mind when you think of alcohol? Probably alcoholic drinks like beer or wine. But in organic chemistry alcohols are an important and versatile family of compounds. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll use alcohols as a starting point to get other types of compounds like ethers, epoxides, and more!

We’ve already learned the basics of carbonyl chemistry and talked about how we can synthesize aldehydes and ketones, but there’s still so much more to learn, like the role carbonyl groups play in reactions involving sedatives! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry we’re diving deeper into aldehydes and ketones by focusing on addition reactions of oxygen and nitrogen based nucleophiles. We’ll cover hydrates, acetals and hemiacetals, imines and enamines, and more!

Organic chemistry is a great workout for your brain, and to keep its energy up, your brain needs glucose. To maintain blood glucose levels, our bodies go through a process called gluconeogenesis, which involves the important type of organic reaction we’re getting into today: aldol reactions! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn what an aldol is, as well as how aldol reactions work and what they do. Plus we’ll learn about a similar reaction, Claisen condensation.

Alkanes are kind of the wallflowers of organic chemistry, but they still have important functions in the world around us. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry we’re building our knowledge of organic molecules by learning all about these so called couch potatoes from how they are separated from crude oil to how to use Newman projections to predict torsional strain and steric hinderance. We’ll also learn the names of some common conformers and get an introduction to cycloalkanes.

Like a trendy dance, a fighting combo, or a secret handshake, organic reactions can be broken down into simpler steps. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll specifically be looking at alkene addition reactions, and with each new reaction ask ourselves three questions to help us puzzle through the mechanism and understand what’s going on.

Oxidation-reduction reactions are going on around us, and inside us, all the time, and we can make redox reactions in organic chemistry easier to understand by tracking carbon-oxygen bonds. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll focus on alkene redox reactions and revisit our 3-part secret handshake to help us better understand patterns and predict the products of these reactions.

Carbon-carbon double bonds are pretty common in nature, but triple bonds between carbons, called alkynes, are not. When alkynes do pop up in nature, it’s usually in a compound that’s toxic to humans, however, we can synthesize alkynes that are life saving medicines and materials. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn about alkynes and some of the reactions we can use them in (hint: it’s a lot of the same reactions we used for alkenes!)

Did you know that the fishier a fish smells, the longer it’s been out of the water? This is due to a chemical called trimethylamine, which is an amine, the class of organic compounds we’re discussing in this episode! Although they tend to be pretty stinky, amines are important in many fields like biochemistry, medicine, and agriculture. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll explore amine formation and basicity, and revisit some old friends, imines and enamines!

If you’ve been paying attention so far in this series, you’ve probably heard of benzene. This molecule is flat, cyclic, and belongs to a special class of compounds known as aromatics. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn all about aromatic compounds, their properties, reactivities, and some of the most important examples, like benzene. We’ll also revisit our friend NMR, and hear about some dubious science history!

Language is complicated, especially in organic chemistry. This episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry is all about nomenclature. We'll dive into IUPAC systematic naming of organic molecules, and get to practice with the help of three trusty steps!

Although we've spent a lot of time in this series looking at human-made organic chemicals, the term "organic chemistry" was originally used to describe molecules isolated from living things. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we're going back to our roots to learn more about the best synthetic chemists: living things. We'll look at the biochemical building blocks of life from the nitrogenous bases, sugars, and phosphate groups that make up DNA and RNA, to amino acids and lipids, and we'll learn how to convert between Fischer and Haworth projections of carbohydrates.

You might think a self regulating factory sounds pretty unbelievable, but that’s pretty much exactly how our bodies work! Our bodies are full of regulatory mechanisms that keep all the organic molecules we need to live in balance. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll look at the building blocks that form these biological polymers, including carbohydrates, proteins, and DNA!

Esters have a wide range of uses, from giving perfumes and colognes their fragrances, to preventing diseases like scurvy. Vitamin C, that scurvy preventing antioxidant, is derived from carboxylic acids, a class of organic compounds we’ve already learned a lot about! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll look at four different carboxylic acid derivatives and their reactivities, react them with nucleophiles, and learn some hydrolysis reaction mechanisms that we can use in our synthesis of penicillin!

We get it, learning so many different organic reactions is probably giving you a headache, but hopefully this episode can help! We’re getting even deeper into carboxylic acid derivatives, some of which are used in common headache relieving painkillers. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn how to convert more reactive carboxylic acid derivatives into less reactive ones, turn carboxylic acids into acid chlorides, reduce carboxylic acid derivatives using metal hydrides, and more! Plus, we’ll get to add the first stage of synthesizing Penicillin V to our Mold Medicine Map!

What do the smells of feet, armpits, vomit, and goats all have in common? (Besides being super gross…) Carboxylic acids! Despite being responsible for some of our least favorite odors, carboxylic acids are also super useful in organic chemistry. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll review carboxylic acid synthesis and nomenclature, react carboxylic acids to form salts, esters, and acid chlorides, and start our journey towards synthesizing one of the most important organic chemicals in medicine, penicillin!

Things have been getting more and more complicated here in Crash Course Organic Chemistry, and as we deal with more complex molecules, parts of molecules we don’t want to react will start reacting along with the parts that we do. Luckily, we have protecting groups, which act like a chemical disguise and help us control how molecules react. In this episode, we’ll look at what makes a good protecting group, as well as identify some good protecting groups for different functional groups. We’ll also see what role protecting groups play in the synthesis of penicillin!

Carrots get their orange-y color from, you guessed it, an organic chemical. This chemical, called beta carotene, gets its pigment from its conjugated electron system. We’ve talked some already about conjugation, but in this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry we’ll go even deeper and look at how conjugation stabilizes molecules and how p orbitals can overlap to form pi molecular orbitals of different energy levels. Plus we’ll learn what UV spectroscopy can show us about conjugated molecules.

Insects can communicate with each other about all kinds of things, but instead of using words, they use… you guessed it! Organic Chemistry! Insects can send signals to each other by secreting compounds, and one such compound used by termites contains the functional group we’re going to learn all about in this episode: enones! In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’ll learn about crossed aldol reactions, the formation of kinetic and thermodynamic enolates, hard and soft nucleophiles, conjugate addition, and of course, enones!