Abstract
Although they were discovered almost a century ago, atropisomers are only now having their heyday. Uncovered by James Kenner and George Hallatt Christie at the University of Sheffield in 1922, this exotic class of chiral compounds revealed itself to the duo in a deceptively simple molecule. The compound, dubbed 6,6′-dinitro-2,2′-diphenic acid, consists of two aromatic rings lashed together by a carbon-carbon bond that is flanked by a carboxylic acid and nitro group jutting from each ring. In typical molecules, rings linked with a single bond would spin freely. But as the rings in this infamous compound try to rotate, the molecular groups projecting from them clash, jamming the molecule’s rotational motion and creating asymmetry. Depending on the position in which the molecular rotor locks, two distinct forms of the compound can appear. Kenner and Christie confirmed atropisomers’ existence by crystallizing salts of both forms. The phenomenon, which was later found
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