- Industry: Chemistry
- Number of terms: 1965
- Number of blossaries: 0
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The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) serves to advance the worldwide aspects of the chemical sciences and to contribute to the application of chemistry in the service of people and the environment. As a scientific, international, non-governmental and objective body, IUPAC ...
A detailed description of the process leading from the reactants to the products of a reaction, including a characterization as complete as possible of the composition, structure, energy and other properties of reaction intermediates, products, and transition states. An acceptable mechanism of a specified reaction (and there may be a number of such alternative mechanisms not excluded by the evidence) must be consistent with the reaction stoichiometry, the rate law, and with all other available experimental data, such as the stereochemical course of the reaction. Inferences concerning the electronic motions which dynamically interconvert successive species along the reaction path (as represented by curved arrows, for example) are often included in the description of a mechanism.
It should be noted that for many reactions all this information is not available and the suggested mechanism is based on incomplete experimental data. It is not appropriate to use the term mechanism to describe a statement of the probable sequence in a set of stepwise reactions. That should be referred to as a reaction sequence, and not a mechanism.
Industry:Chemistry
Irreversible inhibition of an enzyme due to its catalysis of the reaction of an artificial substrate. Also called "suicide inhibition".
Industry:Chemistry
The phase (and composition of the phase) in which chemical species and their reactions are studied in a particular investigation.
Industry:Chemistry
The term originally signified that a correction was made (not made) for the emergent stem of the thermometer. In current usage it often means that the accuracy of the thermometer was (was not) verified. This current usage is inappropriate and should be abandoned.
Industry:Chemistry
Cleavage of a bond in a radical ion whereby a radical and an ion are formed. The term reflects the mechanistic duality of the process, which can be viewed as homolytic or heterolytic depending on how the electrons are attributed to the fragments.
Industry:Chemistry
The effect (on reaction rates, ionization equilibria, etc.) attributed to a substituent due to overlap of its p or pi orbitals with the p or pi orbitals of the rest of the molecular entity. Delocalization is thereby introduced or extended, and electronic charge may flow to or from the substituent. The effect is symbolized by M.
Strictly understood, the mesomeric effect operates in the ground electronic state of the molecule. When the molecule undergoes electronic excitation or its energy is increased on the way to the transition state of a chemical reaction, the mesomeric effect may be enhanced by the electromeric effect, but this term is not much used, and the mesomeric and electromeric effects tend to be subsumed in the term resonance effect of a substituent.
Industry:Chemistry
Essentially synonymous with resonance. The term is particularly associated with the picture of pi electrons as less localized in an actual molecule than in a Lewis formula.
The term is intended to imply that the correct representation of a structure is intermediate between two or more Lewis formulae.
Industry:Chemistry
The phase of a liquid crystalline compound between the crystalline and the isotropic liquid phase.
Industry:Chemistry
The acceleration of a chemical reaction in solution by the addition of a surfactant at a concentration higher than its critical micelle concentration so that the reaction can proceed in the environment of surfactant aggregates (micelles). (Rate enhancements may be due, for example, to higher concentration of the reactants in that environment, more favorable orientation and solvation of the species, or enhanced rate constants in the micellar pseudophase of the surfactant aggregate.) Micelle formation can also lead to a decreased reaction rate.
Industry:Chemistry
Surfactants in solution are often association colloids, that is, they tend to form aggregates of colloidal dimensions, which exist in equilibrium with the molecules or ions from which they are formed. Such aggregates are termed micelles.
Industry:Chemistry
