Separation of acids, bases and neutral compounds

INTRODUCTION

As a chemist, you will be dealing with complex mixtures of many compounds.
Almost always when you carry out a preparative experiment, you will need to separate the product from the reaction mixture.
At other times, you will want to isolate a specific natural product from plant or animal tissue.
Therefore, the separation and purification of compounds are very important task(s) for an organic chemist.

Acid-base extraction, the technique you will learn in this site (and in the lab) is a powerful method to separate organic compounds of different solubility classes:

organic acids, organic bases, and neutral compounds.

Dividing the components of a mixture by solubility is usually done at the beginning of the isolation of a complicated natural product mixture.

 

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