Question

The LD50 (lethal dose, 50%) is a value used in toxicology which gives the amount of a substance required to kill 50% of e test population. It is usually reported based on body weight. for racemic carvone LD50 is reported as 1640 mg/kg

a. Would you consider carvone to be toxic to an average person? briefly explain your answer

b. Would you expect this LD50 value to be the same for each enantiomer? briefly explain your answer at the molecular level in stereochemical terms.

Answer 1

Carvone will be moderately toxic to an average person (weighing 70kg) as it falls under the range of moderately toxic which is given as 0.5-5 g/kg and we have calculated LD50 to be 1640mg/kg=1.64 g/kg which is well within this range of moderate toxicity.

Q2

As Enantiomer differ only in their direction of rotation of plane polarised light and have same physical and chemical properties so we can expect them to have the same LD values.

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