Chicken wire (chemistry)

In chemistry, the term chicken wire is used in different contexts. Most of them relate to the similarity of the regular hexagonal (honeycomb-like) patterns found in certain chemical compounds to the mesh structure commonly seen in real chicken wire.

Buckminster­fullerene "Bucky ball" with a chicken wire-like chemical structure

Chicken wire

Examples

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or graphenes—including fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and graphite—have a hexagonal structure that is often described as chicken wire-like.^[1][2][3]

Hydrogen bonded (dashed) complex between melamine (blue) and cyanuric acid (red)

Hexagonal molecular structures

A hexagonal structure that is often described as chicken wire-like can also be found in other types of chemical compounds such as:

Hydrogen-bonded "chicken wire" of boric acid.

• Non-aromatic polycyclic hydrocarbons, e.g. steroids like cholesterol^[4]
• Flat hexagonal hydrogen bonded trimesic acid (benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylic acid),^[5] boric acid, or melamine-cyanuric acid complexes^[6]
• Interwoven molecule chains in the inorganic polymer NaAuS^[7]
• Complexes of the protein clathrin^[8]

Phenanthrene drawn in "chicken wire notation"

Additional information

Bond line notation

The skeletal formula is a method to draw structural formulas of organic compounds where lines represent the chemical bonds and the vertices represent implicit carbon atoms.^[9] This notation is sometimes called chicken wire notation by a Stanford professor.^[10][11][12]

Chemical structure of the fictional molecule 1,35-dimethyl-chickenwire

Chemical joke

It is an old joke^{[dubious – discuss]} in chemistry to draw a polycyclic hexagonal chemical structure and call this fictional compound chickenwire.^{[citation needed]} By adding one or two simple chemical groups to this skeleton, the compound can then be named following the official chemical naming convention. An example is 1,2-Dimethyl-chickenwire in a cartoon by Nick D. Kim.

A "chicken wire surface plot" of n,n-Dimethyltryptamine

Surface plots

In computational chemistry a chicken wire model or chicken wire surface plot is a way to visualize molecular models by drawing the polygon mesh of their surface (defined e.g. as the van der Waals radius or a certain electron density).^{[citation needed]}