In this award, funded by the Chemical Measurement and Imaging Program of the Division of Chemistry, Professor Thomas Wenzel of Bates College and his undergraduate student researchers will be supported to synthesize and characterize new kinds of chiral NMR shift reagents. The kinds of reagents that Prof. Wenzel and his students create will enable chemists to rapidly determine the enantiomeric purity of newly synthesized compounds.
Chiral molecules are molecules that have "handed" symmetry. They differ in structure from each other only in the sense that they are mirror images of each other. Since they have identical chemical structures, except for their handedness, it is difficult or impossible to use analytical techniques like NMR to assess the enantiomeric purity of mixtures of these compounds. Professor Wenzel and his students are interested in designing reagents that will interact with different optical isomers to different extent, which will cause differences in the NMR spectra for the different isomers. This work has important applications in the analysis of pharmaceuticals. The undergraduate students working on this project will gain useful experience in carrying out the physico-chemical characterization of these interesting molecules, and they will be prepared for further study in the chemical sciences.
