My first week
Tuesday, the 25th, was my first real day in the lab. Dr. Balaz introduced me to the graduate students and the project I will be working on. His students are all international, from South Korea, Cameroon, and Armenia. If you are advantageous enough to learn about what his research team does, Google Dr. Milan Balaz, his website is the first result.
My first assignment was to follow one of his students around the lab to learn where every thing was location and to get my feet wet. I followed Fidelis Ngwa, one of two students from Cameroon. I practiced techniques with Fidelis, all of which I have learned before in Organic Chemistry, but I was slightly rusty on. I couldn’t quite remember all the steps to packing a column, but I got there.
My desk
Ultra-cool leather bound lab notebook!
That night, Dr. Balaz treated his research team and I to a sushi dinner at a local restaurant (I can never turn down sushi). It was delicious and meeting all of the students was fun. We exchange a lot of questions about our hometowns and universities and it was interesting learning about their experiences. All of the students speak English very well, so communication is not difficult. At times, some of the students from Cameroon will speak their version of broken English to each other, which is a mixture of English and German. If I listen closely enough I can recognize words and understand the basic theme of the conversation. Some of the students told me that I was not a typical American. I wasn’t quite sure what they meant by this, and they said it was because I am a young female that enjoys science and I’m not lazy. At times, I don’t think I would agree about my level of laziness, but I took it as a compliment.
A boat load of sushi!
My project is a branch from Gevorg’s research (found on Dr. Balaz’s website). In simplest terms for my non-scientific audience: I am trying to find/develop synthesis methods for manipulating porphyrin synthesis. What are porphyrins? They are highly colored and naturally existing compounds found in blood cells and chlorophyll (two of many places) and cause the red and green pigmentations observed, respectively. The simplest porphyrin is porphine, and that structure is considered the “backbone” of every porphyrin structure. Porphine can be synthesized, but trying to further add to the backbone to make other porphyrin compounds is very difficult because the all of the reactive sites are equal. For example, if you would like to introduce a new functionality to only one of the sites, you are likely to introduce that functionality to multiple or all of the sites. In other words, selectivity is hard to control. My job is to work on reaction conditions that Dr. Balaz has proposed and determine if they allow for selective synthesis, and what are the optimal conditions.
Porphine
The rest of the week, I jumped straight into synthesis. Fidelis and Dr. Balaz tested my knowledge on mechanisms by having me draw out the entire mechanism for a triflouroacetic acid catalyzed synthesis of dipyrrole methane from pyrrole and formaldehyde. I impressed them, thanks to Dr. Timm and my experience as a workshop leader for Organic Chem.
In the actual synthesis of dipyrrole methane, I used a new technique I had never heard of. Once I quenched (stopped the reaction) my reaction mixture, I had to distill a solid from my solution. This is done with a Kugelrohr distillation apparatus. The night before, I read about the set up from an article in the Journal of Chemical Education. It is a bulb-to-bulb distillation: my mixture rotates in a glass bulb that is placed inside a heat chamber that reaches higher temperatures than attainable with a rotary evaporator or hot plate. All of the glass bulbs are also under a high vacuum. The first glass bulb is connected through a second glass bulb that sits outside the heat chamber and on an ice bath. As my mixture rotates in the first bulb, my desired product (which conveniently has the lowest boiling point of all products made) evaporates and travels upward into the second bulb and condenses due to the lower temperature. And voila! I have my isolated product, a white crystalline solid.
A modern version of the Kugelrohr distillation apparatus.
The brown stuff is all the crap I don't want, the white stuff it what I'm isolating from it.
Due to the shortened week (thanks to safety classes and introductions), I did not complete much work. That Memorial Day weekend, the entire group of REU students and a few of the advisors (mine included) took a trip to Vedauwoo, a rock-climbing and hiking site just outside of Laramie. The next entry will be about the Vedauwoo experience.
