This story chronicles the quotidian happenings of an undergraduate student studying chemistry at a normal university. I talk about anything from courses, to research in a laboratory, to volunteer work and more! Names are disguised so as to protect t...
Today, I had my physics class on electricity and magnetism. The professor did some interesting demos like melting a copper wire by running a current provided by a battery through said copper wire. But yea after that I went to the Jakobsen lab. My mentor is Markus, and he is one of the most intelligent people I have come across this far in my life.
But yea, today's lab experiment centered around turning thiosalicylic acid into thiosalicylic acid methyl ester. Basically, if you remember something about functional groups from your high school bio or chem class, we basically just turned a carboxylic acid to an ester.
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^thiosalicylic acid
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^thiosalicylic acid methyl ester
What was interesting about today was that the thiosalicylic acid methyl ester smelled like grape flavor, like the kind of smell from grape-flavored medicine. It wasn't terrible, but I don't really like grape flavored foods. But anyways, pretty much every time you finish running a reaction, you want to "work it up." Essentially, what that means is that you transfer your crude reaction mixture into a separation funnel, add in some organic solvent, and then use some aqueous solution to mix and wash out any of the aqueous molecules that might be in your organic layer which contains the product you want (if your product is in the organic layer). If you want to learn more, I suggest just going on youtube and looking it up.
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^separation funnel (sep funnel for short)
But yea, after the workup step is the purification step. This involves running a column, which basically means you have a column filled with silica, and then you pour your reaction mixture down it, and different components in the mixture should come out of the column at different speeds and that is how you obtain the compound you want. I can explain more if you guys want, but again, you can see demos on youtube.
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^Biotage (a machine that helps you run a column)
After you have separated our your desired compound, you would want to confirm its identity through NMR spectroscopy. I haven't looked at my spectrum yet, but hopefully it corresponds to the product. It's pretty late. I should be working on my physics and chem homework. I hope people found this interesting. Let me know what else I should add!
Oh yea, the reason why the chapter is named that way is because my mentor Markus complimented me about how I was independent today by running most of the reaction procedure on my own, so that was cool. IMO it was my best performance in the lab. Have a good night everyone!
Sincerely,
Felix
BTW: The image I used for the lab I just found off Google, so please do not dox!
