How would you draw tryptophan and select the chiral carbon?

1 Answer
Truong-Son N.
Nov 24, 2015

The chiral carbon, if there is one, tends to be the #\mathbfalpha# carbon on an amino acid.

Tryptophan is the only amino acid that has two rings on it. At pH 7.4, it looks like this:

You can see the chiral carbon highlighted. You can tell that it's an #sp^3# carbon and that it has four different substituents on it (#"H"#, #"NH"_3^(+)#, #"COO"^(-)#, and #"CH"_2-"stuff"#). Therefore it's chiral.

Related questions
See all questions in Introduction to Chirality and Chiral Centers
Impact of this question
7409 views around the world
You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License