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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • i don’t mean beta-oxidation, it’s just a series of separated normal reactions. i mean something like this: when first learning about ketones, you might learn about aldol condensation, which has enol as a nucleophile and another carbonyl as electrophile. at some other point you might learn about strecker reaction, which has iminium ion as electrophile and cyanide as nucleophile. but really, what you can do is mix and match, and you can pair enolizable ketone and iminium (mannich reaction) or carbonyl and cyanide (cyanohydrin formation) and then generalize, for example you don’t need strictly ketone for mannich, you can use any electron rich conjugated system like malonate or nitroalkane anion (henry reaction) or phenol or indole. to figure this out you need to study mechanisms. these last two are usually treated as variants of friedel-crafts reaction, but really categories like this are fake

    and to get that right, you need to know how these reactive intermediates look like, how reactive they are, what influences their stability which means that ochem starts with discussion of carbocations, carboanions, radicals, their shapes and orbitals involved, hyperconjugation, solvent effects and the like. and then first reactions taught are sn1/sn2, because these showcase these fundamentals nicely, and from there, it’s about introduction of more compound classes

    we only had synthons introduced during lecture at around 4th year, and only for ochem path, it’s not doing a lot at that point and imo would have much more impact right after ochem intro course











  • I think it would be comparable to situation where all mRNA is suddenly unusable, ie protein synthesis can’t run at all. This would be something like ricin or diphteria toxin poisoning, but instead of being limited to gastrointestinal lining it’s spread all over. I’d guess hours to days before anything visible starts happening (symptoms only start to appear when deficit in new protein synthesis becomes noticeable; all protein already made continues to work for sone time)



  • with wood, the problem was with lignin which is tightly crosslinked, meaning that it’s insoluble and organism willing to eat it has to secrete some enzymes to break it down in smaller bits that can be absorbed

    depending on plastic, this first step might be easier or even happening on its own. there are already bacteria that feed on nylon but nylon starting materials are easier to digest for them