What’s a Racemic Mixture?

What do you notice about these three pictures? Count the number of left gloves and right gloves.

 6 left and 6 right gloves, correct?

What about this one:

I count 8 right gloves, 4 left gloves. So there’s a slight excess of right gloves here.

Finally, this figure:

ONLY right hand gloves here. 12 right gloves, zero left gloves.

So what does this have to do with organic chemistry?

Gloves are chiral objects. That is, they lack an internal plane of symmetry. Left gloves and right gloves are mirror images of each other, but they can’t be superimposed. 

In chemistry, there’s a word we have to describe a pair of non-superimposable mirror images – they’re called enantiomers. 

Tying it back to the drawings, we can have three types of situations.

1. In the first drawing, we have an equal number of left and right gloves (i.e. enantiomers). This is called a racemic mixture of enantiomers.
2. In the second drawing, we have an excess of right gloves compared to left gloves. In a  situtation like this we can say we have an “enantiomeric excess” of gloves,  or alternatively, the mixture is “enantioenriched” in the right-hand glove. [We can also calculate the “excess” here: the mixture is 66% right and 33% left – so we have a 33% “excess” of the right-hand enantiomer].
3. In the third drawing, we have only right-hand gloves. This is said to be an “enantiomerically pure” mixture of gloves, since we have only one enantiomer present.

Related Posts:

• On Cats, Part 6: Stereocenters
• On Cats, Part 5: Enantiocats vs. Diastereocats
• The Single Swap Rule
• On Cats, Part 8: Moe the Meso Cat

Tagged as: chirality, enantioenriched, enantiomers, enantiopure, racemic mixture, stereocenters, stereochemistry