Uridine Synthesis

This experiment monitored the synthesis of uridine from the deamination of cytidine through separating the contents of the reaction mixture using HPLC (High-performance liquid chromatography) at various time intervals since the start of the reaction. Cytidine and uridine standards are ran and the output of the HPLC will show two peaks based on the retention times of each compound. Identified the peak with the retention time of 2.422 minutes is cytidine and uridine has a retention time of 2.716 minutes. After establishing the identity of these peaks, the area under each peak serves as a way to measure amount of cytidine and uridine present as the reaction progresses. Since the area is proportional to the amount of compound present, measured the areas then found the percentages of uridine and cytidine. Both Table 1 and Table 2, showed that as the reaction progressed the percentage of cytidine decreased while the percentage of uridine increased providing evidence of the deamination of cytidine to uridine. The values from Table 1 and Table 2 also show that reaction progressed faster at 30oC than at room temperature since the reaction mixture contains less cytidine in a shorter amount of time at 30oC compared in room temperature. The reaction half-life (t1/2) at room temperature was …show more content…
Reaction scheme of the deamination of cytidine to form uridine

Scheme 2. Mechanism of the deamination of cytidine using NaNO2 in the presence of acetic acid to form uridine.

Conclusion:
The lab showed the successful deamination of cytidine to uridine as monitored by HPLC. The reaction progressed slower at room temperature relative to the same reaction carried out at 30oC. This is supported by the estimated t1/2 at room temperature = 74.5071 minutes and k= 0.0093 compared to at 30oC t1/2=74.5071 minutes and k=0.0287. At physiological temperatures, the reaction rate is estimated to be 0.1316, thus the same reaction would proceed even faster at more elevated