November 22, Dr. Michael Huggins, University of West Florida
To
be completely honest, quite a lot of what Dr. Huggins spoke about was beyond my
grasp in terms of chemistry, but I’ll do my best to sum up. First, a little background: apparently, Dr.
Huggins went from associate professor to head of his school’s chemistry
department in only a few short years. He’s
seems pretty young, and was a fairly engaging speaker, excited about his
research and its progress. His project
deals with hydrogen bonding studies, specifically anion bonding and
self-association of molecules. This can
be said to fall under the category of supramolecular chemistry—“chemistry
beyond the molecule”—which is all about non-covalent bonds in molecular
systems. These interactions are
important because they can be used to make things like “tweezers” or capsules
that won’t react with but can be used to manipulate or enclose other substances
on a molecular level. He works with
dipyrrinones, molecules derived from biliruben, a substance found in human bile
and urine. Biliruben is interesting due
to the fact that it has polar functional groups, but a non-polar conformation. Dipyrrinones undergo strong self-association,
which can be problematic when a chemist wants to bond a dipyrrinone to another
molecule, called the “guest”. Structures
with dipyrrinones have many potential applications, one of the most notable of
which is the detection of chemical weapon such as sarin. NMR spectroscopy is extremely important to
the work he does, which I found interesting—after all, we learned the basics of
NMR here in Organic Chem. I. One final
note: Dr. Huggins does not work alone; he works with graduate students, and
they are more important than some people might think. Indeed, Dr. Huggins mentions the wait for a
grad student with “good hands” to come along to complete a particularly tricky
reaction that is very sensitive when it comes to the placement of
molecules. Well, that’s about all I
could successfully glean from the lecture; I hope it was informative! The image below is from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031857/
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