The following compound, when heated in a solution, undergoes hydrolysis without an acid catalyst. Write a plausible mechanism for the hydrolysis reaction.

Hey, everyone. So in this practice question it says, a following compound when heated in a solution undergoes dehydration without an acid catalyst. Write a plausible mechanism for the reaction. Right. So here we're gonna redraw this structure in order to show what happens. We're going to show our carboxylic acid here. It's connected to this carbon, which is connected to this carbon with 2 methyl groups and a hydroxyl group. What's going to happen here is that this hydroxyl group will deprotonate the carboxylic acid. Oxygen holds on to the electrons. What we wind up creating is our negative oxygen, so our carboxylate anion is formed, and we create water. Remember, water is a good leaving group. So this water molecule will leave creating a Tertiary Carbocation. Now, this tertiary carbocation needs an additional bond. So what happens here is we're going to get a loss of this proton to fall down here to make a double bond. In the process of this, this is really a proton transfer to that carboxylate oxygen that's negatively charged to give us a neutral compound at the end, so our neutral carboxylic acid at the end. So what we just created is a conjugated carboxylic acid. Remember, conjugation leads to greater stability and we created a neutral carboxylic acid in the process. This would be the mechanism that we would use without the use of an acid catalyst. Alright? So this would be our final answer.