How do you tell diastereomers from enantiomers?
1 Answer
Mar 23, 2018
Stereoisomers are molecules with the same connections, but different orientations in space.
The chirality center is where the spatial orientation can change.
Enantiomers are non-superimposable mirror images, whereas diastereomers are non-superimposable non-mirror images.
The former can occur with one chirality center, whereas the latter can only generally occur with more than one chirality center.
As a consequence of the preceding, when a molecule has more than one chirality center, its "family" will include
Relationally, an enantiomer only has one other enantiomer, but could have dozens of diastereomers.
For instance, these are enantiomers,
and, these are diastereomers,
