Week 4 and Beginning of Week 5- GR

I completely forgot to write any posts last week (sorry, Dr. Peretz), so this will summarize all of last week and also today...

On Monday and Tuesday of Week 4, I continued the characterization of GR-1 (whose real name is CNDR-51489) and also the synthesis of the main compound.  We were able to make about 600 mg of the final amine, purified and ready to go.  There was a blip in the purification process, but it ended up working out and we found a very efficient way to purify more samples in the future.  It was thought that this compound could only be purified by the expensive, time consuming HPLC method, so that's where we began, in the HPLC room.  We were disappointed to discover that the HPLC was not working as well as was needed. The product still contained impurities after.  This unfortunate circumstance led us to retry using silica gel column chromatography.  This ended up working fantastically.  The column was quick and easy to run (unlike some other ones that I had to struggle through), the final fractions were very clean, and we were able to put all of the compound into one column compared to the 10 that would be needed for HPLC purification.  It was basically an all around win.  Also, Dr. Peretz visited the lab on Tuesday, so Carlo and I showed her all of the cool stuff that I've been using.

For the rest of the week (up through today as well), I was at a biology lab in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research.  It was a completely different experience.  In addition to the fact that I didn’t really do much work myself (I mainly watched people because I had no experience in the tasks that were being performed), it was a completely different atmosphere then in the chem lab.  The lab itself is much newer, so that was cool, but the type of work was completely different.  It was mainly micropipetting samples into wells.  Plus, the amounts are so miniscule that you can barely see what you're doing.  It's pretty tedious stuff.  The cool thing though, was that, based on the two assays that were analyzed (one was a ThT flourescence assay and the other a sedimentation assay), my compound is actually more active than the one we are making for in vivo testing.  There were a few discrepancies in the data though, so that might not be 100% true, but still, I was happy.  I also got to keep the gel of the protein that we ran as a souvenir :)

I really can't believe that it's already my last week in the lab…

Thanks,

GabRoss