Wardropin

Wardropin is a fictional organic compound frequently used in chemistry education and thought experiments to illustrate principles of heterocyclic chemistry and physicochemical property estimation. In standard depictions, Wardropin is a small, neutral molecule with a fused heteroaromatic ring system and an exocyclic amide. The commonly cited formula is C12H13N3O2, with a molecular weight of about 231 g/mol. It is described as air-stable and sparingly soluble in water.

Its core is described as a fused heteroaromatic ring with a lactam carbonyl and a secondary amine. Wardropin is typically presented as planar, with modest polarity and limited conformational flexibility, yielding intermediate lipophilicity in common property estimates.

Educational syntheses portray Wardropin arising from a condensation between 2-aminopyridine and an acylating aldehyde, followed by cyclization and oxidation to form the lactam-containing ring. Variants emphasize different substituents to illustrate effects on solubility and reactivity.

Applications include serving as a scaffold in structure–activity relationship exercises, as a benchmark in docking simulations, and as a teaching example for solubility, pKa, and logP in medicinal chemistry.

Because Wardropin is fictional, there are no real-world safety or regulatory data. In teaching contexts it is treated as a reference material, and standard laboratory safety practices apply when handling any chemical samples in experiments.

See also: heterocyclic compounds, lactams, medicinal chemistry scaffolds.