Dear Amma, How’s everyone doing? I’m having a lot of fun at school. My hardest class right now is probably my organic chemistry class. You remember the organic chemistry class that I took in high school? It’s a little like that, but definitely harder and more focused on real-world applications. The course actually includes a weekly three-hour lab with its own one-hour lecture. I think it’s a pretty great course because we learn techniques that are used in actual labs. Last week’s experiment really taught me a lot. The goal of the lab was to convert as much of a prodrug into an active, working drug as possible. A prodrug is just a type of medicine that doesn’t work until it gets into your body and changes into an active drug. My group used an
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Enzymes are actually how the human body makes a lot of its vital processes happen. I was learning about them in Bio 172 right when we started this lab, and it was cool to be able to connect a topic between classes. We ran three reactions for our experiment: one with 20mg of enzyme, one with 40mg of enzyme, and one without enzyme. That last one was a control experiment. A control is like a baseline against which an investigator can compare the effect of something else. Our reaction occurred in a beaker of solution, so at the end we needed to separate the solid drug out of the liquid. However, we didn’t want to end up with unreacted prodrug in our final sample, since we wanted to see how much actual drug we ended up with. In organic chemistry, a liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) is often used to separate two compounds with different properties. A LLE uses two liquids that can’t mix, kinda like oil and water. The active form of our drug actually has an electrical charge, while the prodrug doesn’t. One of the layers in the LLE was water, which is really attracted to charges, while the other was diethyl ether, which prefers uncharged
Enzymes are actually how the human body makes a lot of its vital processes happen. I was learning about them in Bio 172 right when we started this lab, and it was cool to be able to connect a topic between classes. We ran three reactions for our experiment: one with 20mg of enzyme, one with 40mg of enzyme, and one without enzyme. That last one was a control experiment. A control is like a baseline against which an investigator can compare the effect of something else. Our reaction occurred in a beaker of solution, so at the end we needed to separate the solid drug out of the liquid. However, we didn’t want to end up with unreacted prodrug in our final sample, since we wanted to see how much actual drug we ended up with. In organic chemistry, a liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) is often used to separate two compounds with different properties. A LLE uses two liquids that can’t mix, kinda like oil and water. The active form of our drug actually has an electrical charge, while the prodrug doesn’t. One of the layers in the LLE was water, which is really attracted to charges, while the other was diethyl ether, which prefers uncharged