Lab - Blog Posts
Taking picture through the lense of microscope ! New World đ
Inktobers 4,5 & 6
If there was a sitcom based on my lab it would be a comedy of errors and near catastrophe featuring the Lab Weirdoâ˘, the Confused Undergradâ˘, the Done With This Shit Fifth Yearâ˘, the Fourth Year Who Is The Only Person Who Knows How The Instruments Work But Is Impossible To Findâ˘, the Ever Present Third Yearâ˘, and the Exhausted Second Yearâ˘
It would be called âDonât Quench the Magnetâ
BLUE MOON
Suli Ayad, an undergraduate working in Kenneth Hansonâs lab at Florida State University, synthesized these crystals of 7-bromo-2-naphthol in a round-bottom flask. Under ultraviolet light, the crystals glow bright blue because when 7-bromo-2-naphthol molecules absorb the energy in UV light, they get excited. The molecules then release that energy as blue light to return to their lower-energy ground state. But Hansonâs group is interested in the chemicalâs excited state for another reason: In the excited state, the molecule is more than 10 billion times as acidic as it is in the ground state. This is due to a shift in electron density away from 7-bromo-2-naphtholâs OH group. The switchable increase in acidity makes the molecule a useful catalyst in organic chemistry.
Submitted by Jamie Wang and Kenneth Hanson. Do science. Take photos Get money. Enter our monthly photo contest here for your chance to win $50!
Related C&EN content:
Crystallized in Orange
Dimming The Lights On Photocatalysis
fun things to do in lab
accidentally crushing a pcr tube when opening it with one hand
dropping⌠anything. especially an entire box of frozen samples.Â
slightly too large gloves and getting them caught as you close tubes
when the magnetic spin bar spins too fast and does the thing
listening to someone elseâs forgotten timer go off
âuh⌠whatâs that smell..â
going in for a pipette tip and then overturning the entire box
16 hour time-points
srsly who invented 16 hr time-points
theyâre inhumane
labelling rows and rows of 600 ul microcentrifuge tubes by hand
âweâre sorry but this reagent has been back-ordered for 3 monthsâ
listening to the scraping noise of plastic culture flasks on metal shelves
getting your samples stuck in any sort of machine
âi need you to go and catalog every chemical we haveâ
cleaning cell culture incubators with aerosolized 70% ethanolÂ
having the fire alarms go off when youâre literally in the middle of something that can not be put down no i will perish in this fire before i forgo this damn experiment!
that sense of pure panic when you realize you miscalculated how much reagent you need
âone of your mice died and its cage mates ate half the bodyâ
Superhero origin story
why hood 32?
Oooooh this is a good story! (Â I think, at least). In my first summer of college I had a stockroom job in the chem department. My friend Annie and I were tasked with inventorying the ENTIRE departmentâs chemicals, and to put chemicals back where they belonged if we found any that were mismatched.Â
One day we were going through the research labs, and we came across a hood that had a SHIT TON of chemicals in it. Instead of trying to find out where they all went, we named a folder in the inventory system âHood 32âł (it was in Hood 32âŚ.). Annie goes âthatâd be a GREAT name for a short story.â I ended up naming my blog after it during that job (because it sounds cool, right? ;) )Â
I ended up working for the professor whose hood had all those chemicals in it, which was an awesome coincidence.Â
THEN when I went to Montana to work, I worked in Hood 32 AGAIN.Â
So it stuck :)
Some random crystals formed from my raw reaction mixture at the bottom of a flask.
The second at the third is cropped from the original sized picture.Â
The picture in a large size (3000px wide) could be found HERE, without watermark. Use it as a wallpaper or print it out and put it on your wall.  Other pictures from the best posts could be  purchased at Society6, now with a free worldwide shipping over here: https://society6.com/labphoto?promo=NJYKQ8VB9QKTÂ
never don't reblog labphoto
Distillation of the reaction product from a pressure tube.Â
This picture may look like thatâs nothing special with it, but in the receiving flask (left side) there is a really-really special disulfide what I was able to prepare first time in pure form with a high yield. For months I was unable to prepare this molecule with a high selectivity from the starting materials. Always at least 2-5 side products formed and the product was only isolated in a low, 10-20% yield.Â
Day 2 of our mushroom lab: running our sample through a DEAE-Sepharose column
Formation of a polyaromatic imidazole based compound.Â
I used quite harsh conditions to prepare this compound (polyphosphoric acid and 180 °C), but instead of obtaining a black mess as usual, I obtained a deep blue reaction mixture with a white mass floating on itâs surface and some white crystals sublimed out from it to the wall of the flask. The only question is, that where is the compound what I am looking forâŚ.
Stupid Lab Mistakes: a Constant Across All Levels of Experience
So today was day one of a tyrosinase lab. We had to centrifuge our organic matter sample (homogenized mushroom gills) to separate the soluble proteins from the rest of the tissue, and we counterbalanced our sample with an identical centrifuge tube of equal weight filled with water. We did all of this under the supervision of a TA and our professor.
My lab partners and I have used centrifuges many times before, but what we (and the instructors) failed to notice was that these particular tubes required an adapter for this particular centrifuge. We were spinning it up to about 7000 rcf when we heard a muffled âbang,â then the centrifuge slowed to a stop. When we opened it up, we discovered that the water tube had EXPLODED, shattering into a hundred little plastic pieces. the tube containing our organic sample slurry was thankfully intact, but it was badly warped and cracked. We spent the next 20 minutes or so carefully wiping water off every nook and cranny of the centrifuge interior, thanking our lucky stars that it wasnât mushroom gloop.
I keep thinking that gaining more practical lab experience will save me from this kind of thing, but if the three different generations of chemists present couldnât keep it from happening then there is no hope. These incidents are the things that add unexpected excitement to my life, though, so I suppose itâs not all bad.
Ooh, I love fluorescent compounds! It's a great reward for the long process of synthesis.
How incredible is this compound I made??! Itâs an NBD amine, which is fluorescent and used for labeling compounds for fluorescence assays.
Iâve done a reaction with 40 wt. % dimethylamine solution in H2O. The bad thing was that it only started when the solution was at 90 °C and it was slightly exothermic, so after it started, it was at 100 °C in no time.
The gas bubbler at the top of the reflux condenser indicated that a LOT dimethylamine gas escaped from the reaction as seen on the gif. The coloration of the liquid in the bubbler was caused by an indicator to see, that dimethylamine is going away or something else is happening.
Finally! Something was made what is a critical compound during the production of a quite special amino acid.Â
The fun part with this was, that I tried nearly 20 methods to obtain this compound, and all of them failed. At last I tried a Chinese recipe what said that the product will be something that could be easily converted to my molecule, but instead of that compound I got the compound what I need out from the reaction. Better news: 90% isolated yield!Â
Vacuum distillation of polyaromatic compounds could be fun.Â
In this case I only had to sit with an UV lamp to see when will my compound distill, since it had a bright blue fluorescence (as seen), while the side products of the reaction did not had any visible emission when irradiated with UV light.
