How to pronounce“dihydroxylation”in English

The overall effect of the anti-dihydroxylation process is the addition of two alcohol groups on opposite sides of the substrate.

And here’s our card to sum up syn-dihydroxylation.

What's most important for this one is which reagents to use for syn-dihydroxylation and generally why they work.

Specifically, we can use epoxides as a gateway to anti-dihydroxylation, a name that hints at the stereochemistry of this reaction: spoiler alert, it's going to be anti addition.

Here's our three-step summary of anti-dihydroxylation.

But if we wanted to add them to the same side we'd need a totally different reaction, logically called syn-dihydroxylation.