CHEM 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Triethylamine, Reagent, Mesylate

• School: BRCC
• Department: CHEM - Chemistry
• Course: CHEM 102
• Professor: Larry Dalton

Document Summary

We haven"t yet been very adventurous with our choice of leaving groups for eliminations: all you have seen so far are e2 from alkyl halides and e1 from protonated alcohols. This is deliberate: the vast majority of the two classes of eliminations use one of these two types of starting materials. Since the leaving group is involved in the rate-determining step of both e1 and e2, in general, any good leaving group will lead to a fast elimination. You may, for example, see amines acting as leaving groups in eliminations of quaternary ammonium salts. In the second, a stabilized tertiary cation could be formed (so either e1 or e2 might occur), but no strong base is present, so the mechanism must be e1. You have just seen that hydroxyl groups can be turned into good leaving groups in acid, but this is only useful for substrates that can react by e1 elimination.