Thesis!

[metherion]

A while ago I posted a thread, which I wanted to necro for an update but I couldn't find.

Anyhow, as some of you may remember, I'm in a master's program from chemistry, and I was debating whether or not to be a thesis student. I received strong urging to go for a thesis.

Well, at the end of my first semester, I found a professor with a research project I could sign on to and space for a grad student.

THUS! Come Wednesday, the start of my 2nd of 4 semesters of graduate school for my master's degree, I will be starting my thesis, which will be on using different types of clays to help separate racemic mixtures of some amino acids. Not sure which yet, we need to look at availability and which ones we can get in sufficient amounts for reasonable prices and all that jazz. But I thought you all might be interested in knowing.

Metherion

 

[Nostromo]

I will be starting my thesis, which will be on using different types of clays to help separate racemic mixtures of some amino acids.

For those of us who are chemistry n00bs, are there practical applications for using clay for this, or is it purely academic?

 

[metherion]

The main one off the top of my head that would be a practical application is cost. Currently, it's rather expensive to separate right and left handed amino acids. But clay is rather cheap, and apparently they've done some previous research on some similar compounds indicating the clays we're using might be suitable. (They've hopefully found the papers over the break, the chemistry building just got renovated, so goodness knows where they are...).

Also, it's got to do with trying to set it up to be usable as a column separation as well. It'll take form a bit more as the semester progresses and it gets finalized and worked on, and now that I KNOW I made THIS thread I can update it now and then ^^.

Metherion

 

[TemperateSeaIsland]

Intersting, my PhD supervisor had a little side project looking at amino acid isomer resolution with clays. Not for commercial work though, he was more interested in abiogenesis.

Good luck with the work. If you can come up with a easy and cheap column chromatography method of purifying a stereoisomers from racemic mixtures it would be big. As someone currently doing a 31 step natural product synthesis it would be damn useful for me.

 

[metherion]

Well, I did my thesis presentation on Friday. It went smashingly well, I just gave it a bit too fast. It was supposed to last 40 minutes and I gave it in just under 35. My advisor and the chair (two of the 4 people who have to sign off on it) both told me I did an outstanding job on it. All I need to do is print out two more copies of the proposal to give to the other 2 people on my committee to sign off on it.

YAAAAY!

So, yeah. Now I can tell a bit more about it. I'm looking at developing a stationary phase separation using clay, because it's very inexpensive compared to current stationary phase separation substrates. We're going to be exchanging protonated amino acids into montmorillonite clays and seeing just how well they can separate other amino acids, and see how feasible it might be for scaled-up industrial usage.

Metherion

 

[Tinker Grey]

Congratulations! Keep up the good work.

 

[thaumaturgy]

The main one off the top of my head that would be a practical application is cost. Currently, it's rather expensive to separate right and left handed amino acids. But clay is rather cheap, and apparently they've done some previous research on some similar compounds indicating the clays we're using might be suitable. (They've hopefully found the papers over the break, the chemistry building just got renovated, so goodness knows where they are...).

Also, it's got to do with trying to set it up to be usable as a column separation as well. It'll take form a bit more as the semester progresses and it gets finalized and worked on, and now that I KNOW I made THIS thread I can update it now and then ^^.

Metherion

Very cool! My former thesis advisor (lo those many eons ago) was using clays to test for catalytic activity in cracking hydrocarbons.

Which clays will you be working with? Smectites? Any particular one or several?

So what's the foundational concept: will the c-face act as the place where the differential adsorption occurs? Or is it matter of "intercalation" into the interlayers as a function of which isomer it is?

This is really cool stuff. I wish now that I had spent more time with clays as I find more utility for them in my job (albeit not in the kind of exciting chemistry you are doing)

Good luck with your study! (And make sure to enjoy the clay mineralogy training...at the time I studied what little I did on clays I thought they were hideously boring but in retrospect they have some of the most interesting crystallography and surface chemistry imaginable. Enjoy!)

 

[metherion]

We'll be working with 4 montmorillonites and one hectorite, with a 40 CEC, an 80 CEC, an 88 CEC, a 120 CEC, and I THINK a 100 CEC in the mix.

As for the concept, it's that we can protonate the amine groups and exchange them into the interlayer space, so we go from having sodium montmorillonite to, say, l-cysteine montmorillonite.

We DO plan to use these interlayer amino acids to preferentially and selectively adsorb one enantiomer, but intercalation isn't the best word, since intercalation indicates reversibility, and part of our feasibility tests will be to see if we CAN recover the adsorbed amino acid. Needless to say, if we're exchanging in cysteine, we're not going to be purifying racemic cysteine. I know two of the others we'll use are aspartic acid and aspargine.

However, it will be a fuction of which enantiomer it is. We're using the d/l system (little d and little l, not D- /L-), since that's how a lot of amino acids are, instead of the absolute R/S system, so the other part, besides the feasibility, is which d/l goes with which cysteine is exchanged into the clay. Besides, I'm not a fan of biochem, so I don't know which d/l amino acid is actually R or S off the top of my head, and I'll have to check my CRC to see if it's in there later, but I don't think so.

Metherion