Tetrahedral hole
Cubic hole
In water, for all vertices, including puckered vertices, there will be the possibility of another link (hydrogen bond) along the radii going outwards. There are five, ten, or twenty equivalent ways these puckered dodecahedra can form for the cubic, tetrahedral, and octahedral holes, respectively. The figures show the maximum amount of puckering when the non-bonded distance between the inner molecules (the edges of the holes) is the same as the bonded distance between two neighbors. In practice, a lesser degree of puckering is to be expected.
These animations use Jmol: an open-source Java viewer for chemical structures in 3D. Use the mouse for control.
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This page was established in 2003 and last updated by Martin Chaplin on 3 August, 2021
