Now, molecular formulas are insufficient for organic compounds because they do not convey structural information. Now, structural information itself gives us an idea about the connectivity of an organic compound as well as the orientation elements take when they bond to each other within that organic compound. Now connectivity is how atoms are connected to each other orientation. That's going to be discussed later on when we talk about stereo isomers. Well, for right now let's not worry about it.
Now, molecular representation, here we have our molecular formula of C2H6O. This structure can be drawn in a couple of ways. C2H6O potential way of drawing this is having our two carbons connected to each other and then we're going to give hydrogen to these, to these carbons. Remember, carbon ideally wants to make four bonds. So far we've used both carbons and five hydrogens. What we have left is an oxygen and a hydrogen. We could then write an oxygen connected to this carbon and then place on it the remaining hydrogen. So this is 1 potential structure from the molecular formula.
Now, there's just not enough information just from this molecular formula, because we could also draw it as our two carbons, each connected to the oxygen and each carbon having 3 hydrogens. Technically, either one of these structures are correct if we're only given the molecular formula. As you can see, we don't have enough information to know for sure which one of these two structures the person might want, right? So that's the limitation when it comes to molecular formulas. We might know the number of elements, but we don't know how they're connected to one another and what their orientation would be in terms of space. All right. So just remember, this is one of the limitations when it comes to molecular formulas.
