1) Today was a rather tiring day, and it was all due to one particular experiment. I spent literally the whole day (from around 8.30am till 9pm) doing one part of this really, really tedious experiment. It's basically silica gel column chromatography (which is meant to purify compounds) turned up to 11. We had a lot of compound to be purified, so obviously, the experiment took much longer.
2) All through the afternoon and evening I was preoccupied with ensuring all the product (collected in those conical flasks you can see below) had been collected. This involved doing a thin-layer chromatography (TLC) after all five conical flasks had been filled. The problem was there was a lot of product to be removed, and even more solution to begin with! So I ended up with the following cycle - prepare solvent, add solvent to column, pump solution out into conical flask, collect into all five conical flasks, do TLC, rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
3) After what I can only assume is a very long time, Chris said not to bother with the rest of the product. On the TLC, the spot (for the product) was getting fainter and fainter - indicating that there was much less product than before. However, the spot was always there (if it was absent that would indicate that we had finished retrieving all our product that we wanted). So we ignored that last bit of product, and focused on evaporating our collected solution.
4) By around 8pm, we had finished evaporating and vacuuming our compound (evaporation to remove the solvent and vacuum to remove any excess moisture). All that was left to do was test this compound to make sure we had synthesised it correctly. Time for mass spectrometry then. Ran the compound over 10 minutes and found the single solitary peak we wanted - that was perfect!
5) Given that this was just one intermediate in a sea of intermediates leading to the final product, I think we can all appreciate the role of a scientist/ researcher in synthesising and optimising complex compounds from scratch. Anyway, that has been my long (and tiring!) day, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it. Thanks very much for visiting, and have a nice weekend ahead. Cheers! :)
Silica gel column chromatography
Lunch with friends
Huge fried chicken thigh, potato strips, and "mapo" tofu (麻婆豆腐)
"Mapo" tofu is tofu (beancurd) set in a spicy sauce, typically a thin, oily, and bright red suspension, based on douban 豆瓣 (fermented broadbean and chili paste) and douchi 豆豉 (fermented black beans), along with minced meat
Thin layer chromatography on a much larger scale...
Had my first taste of "jiaozi" (饺子) in China
(Jiaozi is a kind of Chinese dumpling consisting of a filling of ground meat and/or vegetable filling wrapped into a thinly rolled piece of dough, which is then sealed by pressing the two sides together.
The "jiaozi" that I had is called "xiang gu ji rou jiaozi" (香菇鸡肉饺子) or "shiitake mushroom and chicken dumplings". Tasted absolutely wonderful! :D
A nitrogen gas leak caused this valve to freeze over - oh look what happens if a random finger pokes it...
A trail of water results as the leak cannot repaired - the ice almost instantly vaporises!
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