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Essays on Acid-Base Reactivity Acid-base, or H+ transfer, reactions are crucial to organic chemistry for both practical and theoretical reasons. At a simple, practical level: many reaction rates can be influenced by adding acids and bases. An acid can make a substrate into a better electron acceptor (more electrophilic), while a base can make a substrate into a better electron donor (more nucleophilic). Therefore, acids and bases are used to promote, and even catalyze, chemical reactions. Equally important, H+ transfer changes a molecule's ionization state. Organic ions are often more water-soluble than their neutral counterparts, so acid-base chemistry may offer a way to separate organic compounds (the ions dissolve in any water that is present and leave the neutrals behind). Water solubility also determines how a substance will migrate through our bodies and penetrate our cells. Water solubility also determines how a compound moves through the natural environment. Therefore, the acid-base reactivity of organic molecules plays an important role in medicinal and environmental chemistry. Finally, the theory of acid-base reactivity guides our thinking about most other kinds of reactivity. Most organic reactions involve charge transfer and bond breaking and/or bond making. Acid-base reactions are the simplest kind of reaction of this type. Therefore, chemists have expended considerable effort in trying to understand what structural factors make a molecule a strong acid or base.
pKa tables
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