Glyoxylic acid Glyoxylic acid Glyoxylic acid or oxoacetic acid is an organic compound. Together with acetic acid, glycolic acid, and oxalic acid, glyoxylic acid is one of the C carboxylic acids. It is a colourless solid that occurs naturally and is useful industrially. Glyoxylic acid is usually described with the chemical formula OCHCOH, i.e. containing an aldehyde functional group (see image in upper right). The aldehyde in fact is not observed in solution or as a solid. As seen for many other aldehydes, it exists most commonly as the hydrate. Thus, the formula for glyoxylic acid is really (HO)CHCOH, described as the
Organic compound Friedrich Wöhler synthesized oxalic acid, a compound known to occur only in living organisms, from cyanogen. A more decisive experiment was Wöhler's 1828 synthesis of urea from the inorganic salts potassium cyanate and ammonium sulfate. Urea had long been considered an "organic" compound, as it was known to occur only in the urine of living organisms. Wöhler's experiments were followed by many others, in which increasingly complex "organic" substances were produced from "inorganic" ones without the involvement of any living organism. Even though vitalism has been discredited, scientific nomenclature retains the distinction between "organic" and "inorganic" compounds. The modern meaning