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Silyl ether removed

Fluoride cleaves the silicon–oxygen bond, leaving the alcohol.

mechanism written

What it needs, and what it gives

Reaction class
Deprotection
Typical conditions
Tetrabutylammonium fluoride. Neither acid nor hydrogen will do it.
Mass balance
not stated
Mechanism
Fluoride removal of a silyl group, 2 steps

Conditions are what the literature ordinarily uses, recorded so you can see whether yours are in the usual range. They are not a procedure and they are not scaled to your flask.

How it is thought to happen

Fluoride attacks the silicon, which is where it would rather be than anywhere else, and the alcohol is released.

  1. Fluoride attacks the silicon
  2. The alkoxide takes a proton

This is the pathway taught for the class, not a record of what was observed. On the platform it is drawn on the structures you supply, with the curly arrows on the atoms that actually move.

Try it on your own structures

Enter your reactants in the Reaction Lab. If this transformation matches what you drew, it is applied and the outcome is shown next to the records that back it — with the count of documented reactions doing the same thing on substrates like yours, rather than a confidence score.