Many biological transformations can be simply classified as additions, eliminations, or substitutions. How would you classify the following reactions?
b. 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid

Question

Many biological transformations can be simply classified as additions, eliminations, or substitutions. How would you classify the following reactions?

b. 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid

Chemical reaction showing the conversion of 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid with structural formulas.

Accepted Answer

All right. Hi, everyone. So this question says that organic reactions in biochemistry can generally be grouped as addition elimination or substitution from those groups. How would you classify the reaction below? And here we have a phosphofructokinase reaction in which fructose six phosphate is converted into fructose, 16 B phosphate or bisphosphate. Option A says addition, option B says elimination and option C says substitution. Now it's worth noting that the name, the names of each category of reaction give us an idea as to what that reaction entails starting off with addition. For example, because the word addition implies that something is adding on to a different compound. And that that would be because right, at least two different reagents in an addition reaction combine together to produce one larger product. And another way of thinking of this is when one compound adds across the multiple double or triple bonds that an unsaturated reactant has thereby forming a saturated product. So two compounds are essentially combining together to form one larger 11 saturated one. Now, by contrast, elimination is essentially the opposite of addition because the word elimination implies that something is being removed from a larger molecule. And that's exactly what's happening, right? If we take one larger reactant or at the very least one saturated reactant, then a certain group of the molecule itself gets removed from the larger reactant and therefore creates at least two smaller products, right? One of the products is an unsaturated product and the other is the portion of the reactant that has since been removed and is therefore floating freely. Now, substitution for option c implies a sort of exchange, right? Hence the word substitution. And the reason for that is because in a substitution reaction, one atom or group of a certain molecule is replaced by another. So now lets consider the reaction given, right, the reaction given start off with fructose six phosphate which has an oh group or a hydroxy group on carbon one of the chain. Now, when we compare this to our product, which is fructose 16 bisphosphate, then the hydroxy group is replaced by a phosphate group by the end of the reaction. So on carbon one of the chain, the hydrogen of the hydroxy group has been removed and replaced with the phosphate group. So according to the category of reactions or categories that we talked about previously, the hydrogen has been replaced with the phosphate group, right. So because of this, the following reaction is going to be substitution. And even though it could be argued that the hydrogen has been eliminated, it's been removed. Notice how there are no double bonds formed around carbon one of the chain. So because carbon one remains saturated, then this is simply substitution, not elimination. So our answer is going to be option c in the multiple choice. And with that being said, thank you so very much for watching and I hope you found this helpful.

Many biological transformations can be simply classified as additions, eliminations, or substitutions. How would you classify the following reactions?
b. 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Biological Transformations

Glycolysis

Enzyme Catalysis

Many biological transformations can be simply classified as additions, eliminations, or substitutions. How would you classify the following reactions?b. 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Biological Transformations

Glycolysis

Enzyme Catalysis

Many biological transformations can be simply classified as additions, eliminations, or substitutions. How would you classify the following reactions?
b. 2-Phosphoglyceric acid to phosphoenolpyruvic acid