another life blog

Today, the madness began. It was all nice and peachy before, but all of the sudden, Dr Cunningham starts throwing numbers at us! Sure — this is just simple algebraic manipulation, but what kind of insanity is it?! How are we supposed to know what to assume and etc unless we memorize them? The concept is really difficult to grasp in my opinion.

Lecture Notes

Summary:

To start, we went over the induced fit of the enzyme of how the active site wraps around the substrate and the conformation changes slightly. We then looked at how rate enhancement happens, whether it be just normal organic chemistry, or with the enzyme. It’s important to know the closer you bring the molecules together, the tighter you hold it in the right orientation, the faster the rate.

The difficult part is actually calcuating the rate of reaction, and how fast the product is formed from the reactant. To do this, we use the Michaelis-Menten equation. The concept basically measures what the initial concentrations are, and to make some assumptions and derive the rate constants and etc. I don’t quite really understand it.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 1:02 pm and is filed under BCH 4053. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

So I haven’t scanned the notes for Chapter 22 yet. See how everything is a downward spiral? Soon as I start slacking (skipping on the day of the biochem test), I start to fudge everything. Ah, I’m stupid like that. At least I still come to class =) That’s a plus!

Lecture Notes

Summary:

Today we started with talking about the selective dep-protonation of LDA vs TEA and where the alkene will be formed upon deprotonation. It’s just a quick review of what’s said last time.

We then started talking about the major concept of the chapter, which is the acetoacetic ester and malonic ester synthesis. They’re both very similiar, except the fact that malonic ester is like… symmetrical with the -OEt and the acetoacetic ester has -R on the other side.

Here’re the steps

1) De-protonation of the acid proton (in between the two carbonyls)
2) Alkylate with whatever you want via Sn2 reaction with alkyl halide
3) (If you want to add another alkyl group, repeat 1 & 2)
4) Remove the prosthetic (extra) ester side by
- treating with aqueous acid, which will change BOTH esters to carboxylic acid
- Add heat to start the crazy rearrangement (hoochie-goochie?) where carbon dioxide is released, C double bond to C is formed
5) Enol-Keto taumerization to get back to carboxylic acid

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 11:08 am and is filed under CHM 2211. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.