Finally, we know that by definition, nitriles can be hydrolyzed to carboxylic acid. This happens both in base and in acid. But typically, it's an acid-catalyzed reaction. As you can imagine, you wind up getting water attacking the carbonyl. You wind up kicking electrons up to nitrogen. I'm not going to show you guys the whole mechanism here, and it's not a mechanism that is highly emphasized in this section. But you can imagine that what you wind up getting is something that has like an imine derivative. You end up with something that looks something like this. From there, we have an acid workup. Since we're already in an acidic environment, it's not hard to imagine how through an acid workup, this imine derivative could be turned into a carboxylic acid. That's really all I want to mention. I'm much more interested for you to just memorize these reagents and not specifically know their mechanisms since these are not very important mechanisms for this section of the course.

Let's move on to the next page.