Hello everyone! My name is Giada Amundson and I am doing organic chemistry at Scripps. I have been here for 6 weeks. Only 1 week left! I am gonna miss all of the amazing people I have met here!
Monday, July 17
I started today by taking our product from Friday and started running a prep plate on it to see if it is the first, second, or third product. I then scraped the silica off of the plate that had product 1, product 2, and product 3. Only one of them will be the product, the others are the internal standard that we added on Friday so we could take a NMR yield. After taking NMRs of all three of the products, I found that product 1 was my product. We analyzed the NMR and realized that we need to take NOESY and HSQC NMR to see if we have the E or Z isomer of this product. The rest of the day, I helped my mentor set up some of his reactions for his chemistry projects. We aren’t going to have enough time today to run the NMRs, so we will start with that tomorrow morning.
silica with 3 product lines scratched off
Tuesday, July 18
Today we worked on some of my mentors’ chemistry. I used a separatory funnel to separate his product from the solvent being used. I then filtered and rotovapped that down into a solid. I did this same process on the other reaction he was running. I took an NMR of these products, and they came out pretty good. We had a going away party for one of the graduate students, so we all went to a Korean Barbecue restaurant. It was a lot of fun getting to talk to the members and eat some really good food. Once I got back to the lab, I ran a column on one of the reactions that I was working on this morning. Then we celebrated Keary Engle, the lab’s Principal Investigator because he won the 2023 Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award by the The North Jersey Section of the American Chemical Society.
Wednesday, July 19
My mentor attended his friend’s thesis defense today and was not in the lab, so I finished some of his reactions that I was helping with yesterday. I used another separatory funnel, filtered that, and then rotovapped it down into a solid. I then ran a Biotage column on that, instead of running a column by hand. A Biotage column shows exactly where the product is. I combined all of the tubes that contained the product and rotovapped those down, and took NMRs to make sure I collected the product. Then, I ran a prep plate on the other reaction. I scraped the bands of the product off of the plate and then filtered the products. After they were filtered, I rotovapped them into a solid and took NMRs of all 5 bands of product.
biotage column
Thursday, July 20
I showed my mentor all of the data that I collected yesterday when he was not in the lab. Then we started working up the reactions again. We ran a column of the same reaction that I did yesterday, but we used all of the products that we had made on Tuesday. Yesterday I ran the column on a smaller scale just to see if there was the product we are looking for. Then I did a TLC plate to see where the product was. After our acai bowl lunch, I set up my Z isomer from last week to see if it will work, even though it is on such a small scale. We are trying to see if we can use the little bit I have and take it to the end of the steps as I did with the E isomer last week. So I set up that reaction to stir overnight.
After work, we went to get poke bowls. Then we went to Scripps Pier to watch the most beautiful sunset I have seen in my time here.
me and natalie at scripps pier
Friday, July 21
Today I started by working up my Z isomer from yesterday. This reaction was on such a small scale because I didn’t have a lot of product when we made this last week, so I made a separatory funnel with a pipette to separate my product. Then I rotovapped it down and took an NMR of it. It was not the product we were looking for, but luckily my mentor’s other mentee has been making some more of the E and Z isomers. So we will use that and try that reaction again next week. Then we had our weekly group meeting. One member presented literature that has to do with her project she is doing, and another presented his current research.
After work, we went to watch the sunset again tonight. It was so pretty. Then we got home and finished another episode of our favorite tv show.
Saturday and Sunday, July 22 and 23
On Saturday, I went shopping and to the beach for the whole day by myself. It was a really beautiful day, so I just sat at the beach and read. I stayed until sunset and it was so nice. On Sunday, I am just having a chill morning, and then I went to tour the University of San Diego, as that is potentially a school I want to attend in the future. After that, I just went to the beach for the rest of the day.
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