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Amide formation

A carboxylic acid and an amine combine into an amide, releasing water. Below it: runs of this reaction that somebody published, with the conditions they used.

Mechanism written

What it needs, and what it gives

Reaction class
Amidation
Typical conditions
Usually requires a coupling reagent or strong heating; direct condensation is slow.
Mass balance
balanced — the co-products are written out, not dropped
Mechanism
Nucleophilic acyl substitution, 3 steps

Typical conditions are what the literature ordinarily uses. The worked examples further down are what particular people actually ran, and the two do not always agree.

How it is thought to work

The nucleophile adds to the carbonyl, the carbon holds four groups for a moment, and the leaving group is pushed out as the double bond comes back.

  1. The nucleophile attacks the carbonyl carbon
  2. The carbonyl comes back and the leaving group goes
  3. A base takes the proton

That is the pathway taught for the class, not a finding about any record on this page.

Worked examples

No worked example is shown for this class yet. Its records can be searched by structure in the Reaction Lab.

Reading these records

Everything on a record page came from the source that published it. Conditions the source did not state are shown as not recorded, and no typical value is substituted for them. Yields are whatever was measured by whoever ran the experiment.