Hi everyone, to recap my name is Maiya Wagner, and I feel so blessed to be given the opportunity to work in San Diego interning at the Scripps Research Institute. I am working at the Engle lab, which works with catalysis, and is run by Keary Engle, and with Madison Wagner, a fourth-year graduate student and PhD candidate. It’s been a great five weeks and I can’t believe there’s only one left!
This week was really fun and really full. Monday we started by running four prep plates. To refresh, they are essentially big glass plates coated in silica powder. They work by sorting compounds by polarity, as the plate sits in a shallow layer of solvent that will slowly go up the silica and the more nonpolar a substance is, the more it travels. So the compound gets purified by separating along the plate, and when it’s done we can identify our product by bands formed on the plate under UV light. That gets scraped off of the silica, dissolved in acetone and evaporated down. After we put them on a UV light and they glowed, something really cool to see. After this Madison and I set four small reactions.
This was one of the UV reactive compounds we made, it was really cool to see glow under the light!
On Tuesday we took out the reactions we started from yesterday. We filled tubes with celite and a small cotton ball at the bottom, and filtered it out with ethyl acetate. We then evaporated it and took an NMR. The results came back and we took the liquid out of the NMR tubes and mixed them back with the original compounds. Then we got to do mini extractions. These work because adding hydrochloric acid(HCl) and ethyl acetate(C4H8O2) allows the mixture to essentially separate into the parts we want and don’t want. The different densities separate into different layers and we can pipette it out and extract the product, filtering through sodium sulfate (Na2So4) just in case there is some water accidentally. I was really scared because I was mixing up one of the tubes and it slipped out of my hand and broke! I was so disappointed in myself but Madison was really nice about it. She made sure I wasn’t hurt (I was fine) and we cleaned up the glass and finished the extractions with only three of the reactions. Wednesday we ran prep plates of the three from Tuesday (not four because I broke one). I also watched Madison and another person from the lab, Shenghua, run a reaction with the compound we made two weeks ago. It, too had to be run under nitrogen and was also more at risk of being dangerous as the acid needed to be quenched after we were done. Thursday we ran more prep plates from the reactions, with the same procedure as before with the filtering. In addition, we started a reflux reaction with the reaction Shenghua and Madison did yesterday. The reflux pump is a tall glass tube with another glass spiral tube inside of it, it’s designed to stop the reaction from evaporating so that it can stay at high temperatures without going away. We also ran six little reactions, using the glove box instead because they needed to be done under a nitrogen atmosphere. Friday was the most full day by far. We began by extracting the reflux reaction from yesterday, adding ethyl acetate and water and separating by density, similar to Tuesday but on a larger scale. We also extracted the six little reactions from Thursday too, using the same practices. Madison and I, with Wenji, who works at the lab too, and Shirley, his intern, then went to lunch at an udon place at a mall just a short drive from the lab. It was really good and I had teriyaki chicken katsu rice. We came back and went to group meeting, with two presentations and a warm up that felt less hard but I still didn’t totally understand. After the meeting we evaporated the six little reactions and the two we took from the big reflux reaction that we had extracted earlier that day.
Outside of the lab, we’ve been keeping up and watching Love Island every night with dinner. I made savory crepes with eggs, spinach and chicken, on Monday. The weekend was really relaxing. We went to the beach for a little bit on Saturday, and then came back to change for a fancy dinner and painting party at Chili’s, and then sunset pictures on Pacific Beach.
One of our sunset polaroids together, on Saturday night at the beach
Sunday we all split up in the morning, as Reign had a dance class, Shiloh and Azari went to work, and Lana and I went for a walk/run along the beach. We all came back together in the early afternoon. Overall I think it’s been a really good, productive week. I’m so sad that there’s only one week left, and I will miss everyone so much!
Sounds like a great week with lots of productive findings and experiences.