Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
January 31, 2007
Category: Synthesis
Thionyl chloride is one of the classics of organic synthesis - it is a robust reagent for converting carboxylic acids into acid chlorides. I think it smells unpleasantly like buttered popcorn (mutiple people have told me I'm crazy for thinking...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 30, 2007
Category: Synthesis
The automated chemistry for making DNA uses special monomers called phosphoramidites. To make this, you have a nucleoside (a DNA base + a DMT-protected sugar - everything but the phosphate) - and couple it to a phosphoramidite chloride. Once you've...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 29, 2007
Category: Perfumey
I don't have much to say about acetophenone chemically - It is a useful (and very common) synthetic precursor. It's one of a relatively few chemicals that aren't used as a solvent that many labs keep around in liter bottles....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 6:30 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2007
Category: Stinky
Piperidine is a useful little heterocycle - Walter Gilbert won a Nobel Prize, due in part to his development of a method of sequencing DNA (which uses piperidine as a base). It also has some use in peptide synthesis. Piperidine...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 25, 2007
Category: Drugs
Benzoylecgonine is the primary metabolite of cocaine - it's actually just cocaine minus a methyl group. It's not really used as an intoxicant, but it does have one interesting use: figuring out just how much cocaine people are using....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 24, 2007
Category: Synthesis
Basicity and nucleophilicity are two related concepts, but they don't always correlate. This is part of what makes teaching and learning chemistry so tricky, especially at first, when it seems like you're just learning a collection of facts (rather than...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:48 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 23, 2007
Category: Drugs
Brodifacoum is warfarin's mean sibling: it is another vitamin K analogue. It's so potent and has such a long half-life (on the order of months!) that it's more of a poison than an anticoagulant. It's used for the expected things;...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 8:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 22, 2007
Category: Drugs
Warfarin belongs to a previously-covered class of molecules known as the coumarins. Coumarins see use both as anticoagulants (in people) and poisons (in certain small animals)....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 6:14 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 18, 2007
Category: Inorganic
Nickel tetracarbonyl, like a lot of metal carbonyls, is an odd duck. Many complexes of metals and carbon monoxide don't act much like metal at all, and Ni(CO)4 isn't an exception. Nickel carbonyl is a liquid, but only just -...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2007
Category: Synthesis
Sodium bisulfite is a decent reducing agent, but lots of synthetic chemists know it as a convenient (and positively ancient) reagent for forming derivatives of aldehydes, which are useful preparatively. When you treat an aldehyde with NaSO3H, an insoluble...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
