Supramolecular and Organic Chemistry

From FRI_Lab

1 Supramolecular Sensors Stream
2 Fall 07
3 Activities
4 Links

Supramolecular Sensors Stream

Construction of a mimic for the sense of taste and smell is the general objective of most of the projects by the Anslyn group at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In this FRI stream, the major objective is the construction of peptidic colorimetric combinatorial sensors for the analysis of wine. Such combinatorial sensors is expected to produce different patterns for specific types of wine so that the combinatorial sensors can subtly distinguish among the wine types. Eventually, such sensors can be applied in the analysis of complex mixtures, such as blood, urine and saliva. Wine is a good point to start with to obtain a proof of concept, aside from the fact that Dr. Anslyn is a wine enthusiast!

Tools needed to accomplish this goal include indicator displacement assay, solid phase peptide synthesis, and some statistical analysis. Although this stream is under organic chemistry, the classical techniques in organic chemistry will be not be thoroughly touched on. However,the modern technique of solid phase synthesis will be highly used and the theories behind the tools will be better understood if students have a good background in organic chemistry. It is however, not necessary as this will be taken up in the spring semester. Fall semester activities involve real-life synthesis of peptides that students designed according to what they have gathered from the literature. Synthesis by students will be guided by the research educator and graduate student assistants.

[edit]

Fall 07

Special thanks to the summer 07 students (the guinea pigs): Carly Smith, Meredith Mosier, Sarah Bartlett, Tian Tian, Jessica Lawshe

Major activity is focused on making peptides that would serve as components of the sensor. Each student is assigned to more than one peptide sequence he/she designed according to what has been found in the literature to bind Cu²⁺ in aqueous medium. It is desirable that the students come up with peptides that can interact with Cu²⁺, even if interaction is only subtle. At the end, all the peptides will be pooled to make up an array in a 96-well plate. Doing an indicator assay on this array will hopefully, produce a pattern of results, determined via the principle component analysis (PCA).

Individual student activities will then be:

peptide synthesis, either manual or automatic
isolation and purification of peptide synthesized
indicator displacement assay involving Cu²⁺, an indicator, the synthesized peptide and a tannin (a known component of wine)
PCA of results (if any)

[edit]

Activities

This is a constantly evolving stream of the FRI (special thanks to the sophomores this year!). Here are the tentative activities (not in order) in Chem 204 (FRI, Anslyn stream only) for this coming spring.

Lab safety
Introduction to chemical literature
General and organic chemistry lab techniques
- suction vs. gravity filtration
- rotary evaporation
- precipitation by salting-out effect
- using the analytical and top loading balance
- setting up a synthesis
- preparation of solutions
- making dilutions
- use of pipettors
- making buffers
- use of pH meters
- vacuum drying
- use of dessicators
- proper washing of glassware in the lab
- use of hoods
- handling organic solvents
- flash column chromatography
- thin layer chromatography
- introduction to a lot of glassware and plasticware
Solution phase vs. solid phase synthesis
UV-Vis spectrophotometry
Indicator Displacement Assay (cuvette and wellplate methods)
ChemDraw and other chemical drawing software
High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)
Mass Spectrometry (MS)
Introduction to solid phase peptide synthesis
Fun project of student's choice, if there is time