Substituent

In organic chemistry and biochemistry, a substituent is an atom or group of atoms substituted in place of a hydrogen atom on the parent chain of a hydrocarbon. The terms substituent, side-chain, group, branch, or pendant group are used almost interchangeably to describe branches from a parent structure, though certain distinctions are made in the context of polymer chemistry. In polymers, side chains extend from a backbone structure. In proteins, side chains are attached to the alpha carbon atoms of the amino acid backbone.

The suffix yl is used when naming organic compounds that contain a single bond replacing one hydrogen; -ylidene and -ylidyne are used with double bonds and triple bonds, respectively. In addition, when naming hydrocarbons that contain a substituent, positional numbers are used to indicate which carbon atom the substituent attaches to when such information is needed to distinguish between isomers. The polar effect exerted by a substituent is a combination of the inductive effect and the mesomeric effect. Additional steric effects result from the volume occupied by a substituent.

The phrases most-substituted and least-substituted are frequently used to describe molecules and predict their products. For example:

• Markovnikov's rule predicts that the hydrogen adds to the carbon of the alkene functional group that has the greater number of hydrogen substituents.
• Zaitsev's rule predicts that the major reaction product is the alkene with the more highly substituted (more stable) double bond.