Welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to have a look at terpenes. Terpenes are a family of compounds that are often used in fragrances and can be found in essential oils. Essential oils are used as fragrance in many products such as cleaning products, medical products and cosmetics.
Terpenes, as part of essential oils, are made up of isoprene units. This is an isoprene unit here. Buta 1.3.
Die in. When looking at terpenes you should be able to identify how many isoprene units are present within a molecule. Let's have a look at some terpenes.
Here is a terpene which is made up of two isoprene units. You can see them in blue and red. To be able to find out how many isoprene units there are within a terpene you would count the number of carbons and then divide by five as there are five carbons within an isoprene unit. When counting the number of carbons when you see it in a structure such as this one here you're looking for each of the corners. the structure.
So for example we have an end here, a corner here, here and here and then more here. At each corner that you see drawn there is a carbon with as many hydrogens as are required to create four bonds around that carbon. This molecule here is called a terpenoid. A terpenoid is an oxidised terpene.
If you have a look at the terpenoid structure you will find an oxygen somewhere within the structure. The smells of terpenoids tend to be more spicy. This terpenoid is made up of three different isoprene units.
This red one here, a blue one here and the green one here. Finally, this isoprene here, if we count up the full number of carbons, we have 20 carbons. This means that we have four isoprene units. This red one, a blue one, this green one and the purple one here. Have a look at these terpenes and terpenoids and work out how many isoprene units are within each.
Pause the video now. In each of these structures, we're going to count the number of carbons and divide by 5. I will then highlight where the isoprenes are within each of these terpenes. So this first structure, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 carbons.
If we divide that by 5, we get 3. So we have 3 isoprene units within this terpene. So we have one here. We have another here.
And then our final one here. Let's look at this next one. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So we have 10 divided by 5, which is 2 isoprene units. Let's highlight these in green this time.
And finally, a terpenoid. So we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. So we have 20 carbons and we divide by 5 to have 4 isoprene units. Let's highlight those in pink. Thank you for watching this video on terpenes.
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