Question

Show Camphor's chiral centre.

Answer 1

Camphor: It is a terpenoid with a chemical formula ${\mathrm{C}}_{10}{\mathrm{H}}_{16}\mathrm{O}$. It is found in the wood of a camphor tree, a large evergreen tree found in East Asia.

Structure of camphor:

Chiral carbon: A carbon in any compound if it has sp3 hybridization and all the four attached groups of carbon is different then it will be said to be a chiral carbon.

In camphor 1 and 4 carbon is the chiral centre because it is attached to 4 different substituents and there is no line of symmetry present in a molecule that's why camphor is an optically active material.

As camphor is optically active it has a mirror image that is non-superimposable to each other and these kinds of pairs are called enantiomers.

The formula to calculate the no. of enantiomers is as follows:

No. of enantiomers: $2^{\mathrm{n}-1}$, where n is a no. of chiral carbon in a compound.

As we have calculated camphor has 2 chiral carbons so the no. of enantiomers are:

$2^{\mathrm{n}-1}$

n = 2

= $2^{2-1}$

= $2^1$

=$2$

So, the total 2 enantiomeric structures a carbon will have one will rotate plane polarised light in a clockwise manner and called dextro-rotatory while the other will rotate plane polarised light in an anti-clockwise manner and called levorotatory.