Published in Henry Rzepa's Blog
Author Henry Rzepa
The anti-periplanar principle permeates organic reactivity. Here I pick up on an example of the antiperiplanar E2 elimination (below, blue) by comparing it to a competing reaction involving a [1,2] antiperiplanar migration (red). The relative rates of these two processes will depend on several factors such as the ability of Cl to donate electrons (red) vs the basicity of the chloride anion (blue) and of course solvent polarity.