I just felt like showing off a little here tonight. These are the before and after pictures:
Upon work-up, many grams of a viscous oil were obtained, contaning a mixture of diastereomers (whose exact composition I cannot go into). My God, did I struggle to get the one isomer I so highly desired out of this soup. Chromatography was a nightmare and I had been struggling so hard for such a long time with this one. Suddenly, lo and behold, I stumbled upon a recrystallization method that actually worked. Not only did I get white crystals, a wet dream itself for many among our kind, but the single diastereomer that precipitated out was – once in a lifetime – the desired one. With the correct absolute stereochemistry in place. The first crop gave 70% yield of perfectly pure material. This was a good day, indeed.
That is IMPRESSIVE! More importantly, what was this recrystallisation method that you have stumbled upon? Would be too glad to have a go. All too pleasing to get beautiful white crystals out of a crude oil like that.
if you can’t distill it or recrystallise you shouldn’t be making it. column chromatography is not only inelegant it is also incredibly incredibly boring.
As an undergrad, doing simple crystallization in lab is already so exciting despite having our hands held all the time. I can’t imagine the feeling of getting the compound you want after so much work!
Hey that looks almost exactly like the S-enantiomer of Taniguchi lactone.