Synthesizing a Key Piece for an Antibiotic Molecule

Presentation Transcript

Brought to you by :

Latasha Anderson and Jacqueline Petroski

-A natural product is a “product (molecule) that is derived from plants, animals or microbial sources.

-They can have medicinal value.

-Synthesis means doing chemical reactions on a small molecule to add on or build up to bigger molecules.

For decades, natural products have been a wellspring of drugs and drug leads.
Penicillin (a miracle drug) was discovered around WWII . It came from a mold!
There were 877 new chemical molecules introduced as drugs worldwide during 1981–2002.
61% of those can be traced to or were inspired by natural products [J. Nat. Prod., 66, 1022 (2003)].

Any of numerous gram-negative, rod-shaped saprophytic bacteria of the phylum Myxobacteria, typically found embedded in slime in which they form complex colonies and noted for their ability to move by gliding along surfaces without any known organ of locomotion.

-Bacteria that predominantly live in the soil and other places……..

Our goal was to make a molecule called a sulfoxide and get as much purity in the handedness as possible.

Since there were some impurites in our reaction we went through three different steps for purification.

~Seperatory Funnel

~Flash Column Chromotagraphy/’Columning”

~Distilation

We made a significant amount of sulfoxide (at least 12g(!) purified)
To check our molecules handedness we took an optical rotation and found that out of 100 molecules, 85 were ‘right’ handed and 15 were ‘left’ handed. (Not too shabby!!)