Organic compounds contain carbon and can be defined broadly or narrowly. The distinction between organic and inorganic is based on outdated vitalism theory. Organic compounds have functional groups that determine their properties and can form polymers and macromolecules. Some common organic categories include hydrocarbons and esters.
Organic compounds are chemicals whose molecules contain carbon. There is no universally accepted and more precise definition of “organic”, which makes it more difficult to define the properties of organic compounds. Today, “organic compounds” most commonly refer to compounds that contain significant amounts of carbon, although they can be defined more loosely to include any carbon-containing molecule or more narrowly to include only molecules that contain carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bonds.
The organic-inorganic distinction is somewhat arbitrary and is largely derived from a theory called vitalism, which posited that the biochemical processes of living things involve an additional energy or force that is not present in the chemical processes that occur in the non-living matter. This has suggested the idea that substances involved in the biology of living things are therefore different from other substances in a way that goes beyond their physical and chemical properties and constitutes a special category distinct from other matter. Vitalism is no longer a commonly accepted theory, and modern biochemistry explains biological processes and the properties of organic compounds according to the same physical laws that govern other chemical reactions, but the category “organic” remains in use, although today the term includes also a number of compounds that do not occur in living things.
There are a vast number of different organic compounds with different properties, which are divided into smaller subclasses based on their composition or the composition of their functional groups and tend to have similar properties. Some organic categories have interesting properties that people often encounter in their daily lives. Hydrocarbons, a category that includes groups of molecules called alkanes, alkenes and arenes based on their structure, consist entirely of hydrogen and carbon and release a large amount of energy when burned, making hydrocarbons such as propane, butane and octane valuable fuel sources. Another type of organic molecule, called ester, makes up vegetable and animal oils and fats.
One of the important properties of organic compounds is the presence of structural units called functional groups. These are groups of atoms within a molecule that are joined to the rest of the molecule by a covalent bond between an atom of the functional group and a carbon atom in the main body of the molecule. An organic molecule can have many functional groups, and these are largely responsible for the chemical properties of the molecule as a whole, because a given functional group will behave in much the same way regardless of the composition of the larger molecule it is attached to. . Organic molecules are often classified and named according to the nature of their functional groups.
Organic molecules vary greatly in size. One of the important properties of organic compounds that makes them so important in biology comes from the fact that carbon atoms can bond together to form chains of carbon atoms in a row or ring, with additional atoms bonded to some of the carbon atoms. carbon. Many identical copies of individual structural units called monomers, which consist of a row of linked carbon atoms with other atoms called side groups attached, can be linked together to form long repeating chains called polymers.
Organic compounds aren’t unique in their ability to do this, but carbon is uniquely suited to this. A single organic polymer molecule can have hundreds of repeating structural units, and more complex polymers can have separate branches that branch off from the central chain and form chemical bonds with other polymer chains to create a single molecule. Some organic compounds are made up of large structures called macromolecules.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
