Kristen Silvi-Week3-NYU

I'm almost at the end of my 3rd week here. This week we continued to test our probe. We did reactions involving our compound (probe) and zinc to see if they bind. We tested this on an NMR machine and saw that the peaks shifted which means that zinc did bind to the compound. We then ran tests on the UV Vis spectrometer. The first test we did using the UV Vis was one cuvette with the compound and buffer in it and then we kept adding more zinc to see if there was a change. We also put this cuvette in the fluorimeter to test its fluorescence. There was no change in fluorescence which was odd because we had expected there to be.
       The next day we took an NMR of just the compound. We took another NMR of the compound and zinc trifluoromethansulfonate rather than ZnCl2. This came out to be successful and we saw a noticeable color change from yellow to a deep orange/red.
       We started another reaction to make the coumarin compound that we used to make our probe. This reaction was done with magic malonate and 3-dimethylaminophenol. We mixed this together with solvent and then got a solid which we then had to mix with an acid to eventually give us our product.
       Yesterday I was in charge of running the UV Vis tests. I had to test 3 different cuvettes. One had our compound+Zinc, the other had just the compound and extra buffer, and the last one had the compound+zinc+urea. We tested these cuvettes over time to see if anything changed during the reaction .

 This is my grad student and I's lab hut.

 This is the area in the lab of everyone's huts

This is the NMR machine. ("It's like an MRI but for chemicals" -Post Doc in my lab)

This is the UV Vis spectrometer machine.