Butane Figure 6 Research Paper

As briefly mentioned before, atropine acts as an antagonist on acetylcholine because its chemical structure is similar to acetylcholine. Thus, structure is an important feature of the atropine molecule that is imperative to understanding its effects on the body. Although today’s chemists know the chemical structure of atropine, the conformational flexibility of the molecule is still poorly understood. A conformation is any three-dimensional arrangement of atoms within a molecule that results from the rotation about a single bond (24). For example, the picture of the atropine molecule in Figure 6 depicts the structure of how the atoms within the molecule are connected by chemical bonds to other atoms in the molecule. However, many chemical bonds …show more content…
To more easily illustrate this idea using the simpler model of butane, Figure 7 depicts the rotation about the bond between carbon 2 and carbon 3 in the butane molecule and the corresponding changes in energy during that rotation. As the atoms are rotated about this bond, the energy contained within the molecule changes. It is more favorable for a molecule to have a lower amount of energy. In general, atoms within the molecule want to stay as far away from each other as possible, and therefore the structures with the lowest energy are the ones in which the atoms are farthest apart from one another …show more content…
However, the energy of this orientation is not as high as the energy at point (a), since a small hydrogen atom eclipsing the larger CH3 group is not as strenuous as when two large CH3 groups eclipse each other. As the bond is rotated further, the graph reaches point (d), where the CH3 groups are as far apart from one another as possible, and no atoms are eclipsed. This point represents the lowest energy, and thus the most stable, orientation of the atoms within the molecule