Draw the condensed structural formula for a glycerophospholipi...

Question

Draw the condensed structural formula for a glycerophospholipid that contains glycerol, two stearic acids, phosphate, and ethanolamine (ionized).

Accepted Answer

Alright. Hello everyone. So this question says that a student examined a Glycerol phospholipid and discovered that it comprises Glycerol, tumeric acids, phosphate and choline draw the structure of the Glycerol phospholipid. So before we go ahead and talk about how to go about drawing this particular g glycerophosphate lipid. Let's just go ahead and get a sense of what the basic structure of any given glycerophosphate lipid looks like. So let's start with our backbone, right? The backbone in question is going to be Glycerol, which is a three carbon chain with three alcohol groups, one on each carbon. So Glycerol is going to be the center of the Glycerol phospholipid because our other components are going to be attached, so to speak to Glycerol itself. One such component is known as the polar head group or phg as I'm abbreviate. Abbreviating it here. So for the polar head group, we have two components to consider, we have the phosphate group directly attaching to Glycerol and then attaching to the phosphate group, we have either an amino alcohol or some other polar group. So I'm putting amino alcohol or other and once again, that's attaching to the phosphate group itself. So here the polar head group is really attaching to carbon number one of Glycerol. So attaching two carbons two and three or the fatty acid chains. So we have fatty acid chain number one, and fatty acid chain number two. So now let's go ahead and start with her drawing. And before I do that, let me actually go ahead and move this to the side, move this to the side so that we can reference it later on. So as mentioned before, let's start with our Glycerol molecule in the very center. So here we have three carbons in total. And for our purposes, we're going to depict carbon number one on the far right side here. And to go ahead and showcase the polar head group, I'm actually going to have the hydroxy group of carbon number one glycerol pointing upwards while the other two point downwards, this is just to better see all components, right? But in any case, attaching to carbon number, one of glycerol is our phosphate group. So really the hydrogen of the hydroxy group is replaced by phosphorus, which is now connecting to oxygen. So from there, we fill in the rest of our phosphate group. And from our phosphate group, we have the attachment point to our amino alcohol. So in this particular case, the amino alcohol listed here is cline. So from one of the oxygens of the phosphate group or from an oxygen connecting to phosphorus, we have a two carbon chain followed by a ordinary ammonium salt or a ordinary ammonium ion. So to make this particular nitrogen in Colline cordinator, we have three more methyl groups attaching to nitrogen itself. All right. So at this point, we have our polar head group and we have our Glycerol backbone. So now let's talk about our fatty acid chains, which just so happened to be mistic acid in both cases. So two mistic acids. Now it just so happens that I went ahead and pre drew the structure of mistic acid and I had that just off screen here. And the reason I did this is just to save a little bit of time with this recording. But in any case, mistic acid is a saturated fatty acid with a total of 14 carbons, one of which is, of course, the carboxylic acid group. So here we have two of these molecules attaching two carbons, two and three of Glycerol. Now recall that this linkage is through an ester bond. So what I'm going to do is erase the hydrogen attached to the oxygen of our carboxylic acid and then use that particular oxygen to tether our fatty acid group to the Glycerol backbone. So let me actually make this a little bit smaller, just a little bit smaller and there's our first equivalent of mistic acid. So because it's the same fatty acid on both available positions, what I'm going to do is just duplicate the first one and then there is our second ether bond. And so now that our structure is honestly complete, we can go ahead and review a few of the different types of bonds holding the structure together. But let me actually make this whole thing smaller once again for the sake of visibility or an attempt at visibility. OK. So as mentioned before, right, the linkage that's going to hold the Glycerol backbone attaching to the fatty acid chains are e linkages right between the alcohol group of Glycerol and the carboxylic acid group of our fatty acids. However, here the phosphate group is attaching to glycerol via a phosphate estra bond and cline, which is our amino alcohol is also attached to phosphate via a phosphate estra bond. And so there you have it. And with that being said, thank you so very much for watching and I hope you found this helpful.

Draw the condensed structural formula for a glycerophospholipid that contains glycerol, two stearic acids, phosphate, and ethanolamine (ionized).

Key Concepts

Glycerophospholipid Structure

Fatty Acids

Ethanolamine Head Group

Watch next