ONS Solubility Challenge in Teaching Lab

Last year Brent Friesen started to experiment with using his organic chemistry teaching lab at Dominican University to carry out new reactions in the pursuit of making new anti-malarial agents, as part of the UsefulChem project.

This year, Brent is involving his class in the Open Notebook Science Challenge to measure the solubility of a variety of organic compounds in non-aqueous solvents (CHEM254). He took the time to write up a comprehensive laboratory handout on the topic so I'm hopeful that this exercise will go smoothly.

As we've discussed repeatedly during the past year the potential for university teaching labs to contribute real new science while training students is immense. It only requires instructors like Brent to take the time to make appropriate changes in the curriculum.

The lab is scheduled to run Jan 21-23, 2009.

JoVE shoot at Drexel

On Saturday July 12, 2008, in my lab at Drexel, we recorded our JoVE shoot for the use of Mettler-Toledo's MiniBlock and automated liquid handler for optimizing a Ugi reaction.

It took about 6 hours and I was very impressed with the professionalism of Ian, the camera man JoVE sent us. The preparation time was much more than that and I appreciate JoVE's flexibility in compressing their regular operating timeline because of our limited time with the equipment.

One of the main challenges was finding an appropriate level of detail and selecting illustrative video sequences to describe the protocol. After working with Tom, Khalid and Aaron from JoVE I think the resulting script should be helpful for people wishing to repeat the experiment. Khalid and I recorded the intro and conclusion and the rest of the script will be recorded by JoVE.

The good news is that the shoot went well I think. Multiple takes were recorded for most sequences so it should be possible to piece together a decent video. However, we discovered flaws in the way we have been programming the MiniMapper, which would explain the strange and inconsistent results we obtained at first.

Thanks to Tom Osborne digging through the log files of our runs to identify the problems, I think we have a liquid handling protocol that is correct now. The first experiment using it (EXP199) is showing reasonable results so far, with the higher concentrations 0.2M and 0.4M and methanol or methanol/ethanol methanol/acetonitrile mixtures showing the higher yields. We'll see if we can get good reproducibility in next few runs. Once that is done we can wrap up the JoVE paper.