STEREOCHEMISTRY OF ORGANIC COMPOUNDS

Stereochemistry Of Organic Compounds..... 

" Stereochemistry is the branch of Chemistry that deals with the  different spatial arrangements of atoms in molecules."

Stereochemistry can trace its roots to the year 1842 when the French chemist Louis Pasteur made an observation that the salt of tartaric acid collected from wine production have the ability to rotate the plane _of polarized light, while other same salts don't have this ability.

This phenomenon is explained as Optical Isomerism.

The study of stereochemistry focuses on stereoisomers, which by definition have the same molecular formula and sequence of bonded atoms ( constitution), but differ in the three-dimensional arrangement of their atoms in space. 

That's why it is also called 3D_ chemistry, the word "stereo" in prefix means" three-dimensionality.

An important branch of stereochemistry is "the study of chiral molecules" In chemistry a molecule or ion is called chiral if it can't be superposed on its mirror image by any combination of rotation, translation, or any other conformational changes.

This geometry property is called "Chirality".

The terms are derived from the Ancient Greek word 'Chair' which means 'hand' the canonical example of an object with this property.

The chiral molecule or stereoisomers exist in two forms which are mirror images of each other, called  "enantiomers" or "non-superimposable stereoisomers."

Each has a chiral carbon, also called asymmetric carbon, stereogenic center, and optically active carbon.

Chirality can be explained as  if one were to flip over the left molecule to the right molecule the atomic spatial arrangement will not be the same, this is equivalent to the left-hand _ right-hand relationship, which is aptly referred to as " handedness in molecules"