Chemical synthesis

In chemistry, chemical synthesis means using chemical reactions to get a product, or several products. This happens by physical and chemical manipulations. Often, several different chemical reactions are used; one after another. Chemists start to design a chemical synthesis by selecting compounds to combine.  These starting chemicals are known as reagents or reactants.  Chemists do various things to these reagents to synthesize the product, or an intermediate product.  This requires mixing the compounds in a reaction vessel.  The vessel can be a chemical reactor or a simple flask.  Many reactions require some form of work-up procedure before the final product is isolated.Vogel, A.I., Tatchell, A.R., Furnis, B.S., Hannaford, A.J. and P.W.G. Smith. Vogel's Textbook of Practical Organic Chemistry, 5th Edition. Prentice Hall, 1996. .

Related pages
 Chemical engineering
 Organic synthesis

References

Other websites
 The Organic Synthesis Archive
 Natural product syntheses