Organic Chemistry Essay

A brief introduction to organic chemistry: organic compounds and their importance

Organic compounds are omnipresent in nature. They are found in living things, foods we eat, in the atmosphere we breathe and in the clothes we wear. In other terms, there is no escaping from organic molecules. What is organic chemistry? It is the study of the structure, properties and reactions of organic compounds (Clayden et al, 2012). So what makes a compound organic? All organic molecules contain carbon and its importance lies in its versatility and the reason to why out of all other elements present on earth, it is chosen as the building block of living things.

Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon has the capability of forming 4 covalent bonds as it is tetravalent and this ability enables it to form long, intricate and short, simple molecules. Also, carbon bonds strike a happy medium between reactivity and stability, as they are not too strong or too weak. If the bonds were too weak, then they would be unstable; if they were too strong, then carbon would be unreactive and ineffectual to organisms (Winter 2005).

In organic chemistry, a homologous series is an assembly of compounds with a general formula, usually varied by the carbon chain length, and that have similar chemical and physical features. The similar chemical properties is due to the presence of the same functional group, (e.g. –COOH, -CHO). A functional group is the reactive part of the molecule and may contain oxygen, nitrogen or other elements either as a singular atom or in a combination. Organic chemistry focuses on the way these atoms are bonded together and how the structures of these compounds change during chemical reactions. Physical properties of compounds are similar but fluctuate depending on molecular mass. An example being boiling and melting which increase when there is...