ChemTube3D - Interactive 3D Organic Reaction Mechanisms
ChemTube3D is a freely available web site based at the University of Liverpool aimed at students, lecturers and practising chemists. It contains interactive 3D animations for most of the important organic reactions with supporting information on reactivity and spectroscopy. This provides a unique view of organic reaction mechanisms and surprising insight.
Each page contains some information about the reaction, and an intuitive interactive reaction scheme that controls the display. 3D curly arrows indicate the reaction mechanism and the entire sequence from starting materials via transition state to products is displayed with animated bond-breaking and forming and animated charges and lone pairs. The entire process is under the user’s control in 3D and can be viewed from any angle, unlike those that show a single view. The new resizable window button produces a larger window with a range of control options, which is ideal for projection in lectures, and the molecular photo booth allows a permanent record of any desired view.
At present there are around 100 different animated reaction sequences ranging from simple nucleophilic substitions (SN2) to Diels-Alder reactions, palladium(0) catalytic cycles, aromatic heterocyclic reactions, fragmentations and 30 pages devoted to atomic and molecular orbitals, electrostatic surfaces and vibrations.
ChemTube3D uses the open source viewer Jmol to display the animations so users can interact with the animated 3D structures using the pop-up menu or console using only a web browser. It is ideal for personalised learning and open-ended investigation is possible. Have a look at a reaction you think you know well and learn something new about how it actually proceeds!
There are also new sections covering solid state crystalline structures in 3D with options to display unit cells, individual coordination polyhedra and entire lattices and polymeric structures. They will be adding more reactions structures in the near future.
For more information please visit www.chemtube3d.com
Cartoon and Calculated molecular Orbital of Benzene
Diels-Alder Mechanisms in 3D
Electrostatic Surface of Benzene
SN2 Transition State
ChemTube3D was developed at the University of Liverpool by Nick Greeves, Neil Berry, Alex Lawrenson, Kirsty Barnes, Lyndsey Vernon and Sze-Kie Ho on Mac OS X using Spartan 04 and 08, GAMESS, PC-GAMESS/Firefly, MacMolPlt and visualised using Jmol.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Higher Education Academy Physical Sciences centre , EPSRC and EPSRC Complex Materials Discovery Portfolio Partnership.