Hi Dad How is it going? My first semester at the University of Michigan is very exciting. One of my favorite classes is the organic chemistry lab. It is completely different from the typical Orgo lab that you took at college. The instructors are trying to teach us the applications of chemistry in real life. Indeed, we, as students, are even creating our own experiment and testing our own hypothesis. This week, my group’s experimental goal was to convert an inactive prodruge to an active drug. You can say that the prodruge is a medication that does not work until it undergoes a reaction and changes to an active, working drug in our body. My group predicted that a higher pH, which means a more basic compound, would lead to a higher percent yield of the active drug. …show more content…
We used different molarities to get different strengths. For example, for our strong base (pH 14) the molarity of NaOH was 1. For even a stronger base (pH 14.6), we used 4 Molar of NaOH. As you know, we used deionized water as a control for the reaction because its pH is 7. Also, our prodruge was 200mg. After that, we applied the TLC Plate method to monitor the reaction progress. TLC is a simple and inexpensive way to show the number of the components in the tested mixture. These all involve using solvent with a specific polarity, a jar with soaked paper, and a high polarity silica plate. If our compound is highly polar, it will stick to the silica plate and will not move up on it. If the compound is not polar enough, the solvent will encases the compound; as a result, the compound will move up on the plate, as well as the