Talk:Inherent chirality

I don't think this is an article of grat interest. It is about a very particular (and unknonw) aspect of stereochemisty, cited in just two articles on two low impact-factor journal. Can we delete the page?--Chetene (talk) 22:55, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose: compounds that are chiral due to conformational barriers are (among others) used routinely in organic synthesis; see also Atropisomer. One can find this in textbooks, substantiated by many thousands of papers spanning roughly half a century.

I do, however, agree that something needs to be done about the way the subject is treated on Wikipedia. The page in its present form makes it look like it's covering a large number of distinct, exotic sources of chirality, while it's fundamentally all the same: compounds that are chiral because a kinetic barrier prevents mirror-image conformations from equilibrating at experimental temperatures and time scales. And atropisomerism perfectly fits this description, so there should at least be links back-and-forth between the two pages.

Opinion: I personally hate the term "inherent chirality" because it (a) is exceedingly nondescriptive and (b) seems to be the exact opposite of what's actually going on. Even "emergent chirality" would be better, contrasting with the truly inherent chirality of asymmetric centers. But that's almost equally nondescriptive, so I would prefer something like "conformational chirality". Even broadening the term "atropisomerism" to encompass the stuff on this page would be better, but that's obviously well outside of Wikipedia's scope. Though I would say it would be warranted to rename the page to "conformational chirality", because that's much more descriptive and pretty much spot-on.

OneAhead (talk) 14:54, 28 March 2021 (UTC)