I’m at the point in my PhD where there are various different workshops and symposia to be applied for. Certain large companies want to court final year PhD students at just about the time students are looking for jobs. Even if the companies are laying off employees by the hundreds.
I’ve been caught up in these applications for CV fodder. Perhaps the most interesting is a competition to write a 250 word lay summary of your research.
Whenever I tell somebody that I’m a chemist they always ask what I’m working on. It’s hard to explain. And I think I’m good at explaining. So if you have ever wondered what I do, here it is, as straight-up-plain-English as I can manage it…
Controlling Reacting Molecules to Make New Compounds
We have discovered a way to control the shape of reacting molecules to make a class of compounds that could not be made until now.
We have used new chemistry involving reactive lithium-containing molecules to move groups of atoms across a molecule onto a carbon atom next to sulfur. This kind of reaction is called a rearrangement. Once we have carried out the rearrangement we can do a second very simple reaction to form a thiol, a biologically important class of compound.
This reaction can be done very efficiently, but the trick comes in controlling the shape of the final product.
Many molecules in nature can exist in two shapes called enantiomers. These shapes are mirror images, just like your hands, but they can possess very different biological properties. For example, one ‘hand’ of a drug might be useful for treating a disease while the other ‘hand’ might be inactive or even toxic. Because of this, a vast amount of modern research is focused on controlling enantiomers in chemical reactions.
In our reaction, rearrangement can occur at two sides of a lithium-bonded carbon atom. By using a relatively large additive that surrounds the lithium atom we can ‘block off’ one side of the reacting molecule. This forces the migrating group to react on one side exclusively, forming only one of the two possible enantiomers.
Using this method we are able to make single enantiomers of large thiols very effectively.