Kinetic experiments are often limited by the necessity of hand mixing, which produces atypically slow reactions. These reactions are not representative of those encountered in real-world situations. This limitation is being addressed by the purchase of a stopped-flow apparatus with fluorescence and absorbance detection equipment. Six kinetic experiments are being developed that illustrate fundamental chemical and biological processes and incorporate them into the physical, analytical, inorganic, and biological chemistry laboratories. These new experiments are developing the chemical intuition of the students, giving them a sense of the time scales over which reactions occur. Examples include the very fast proton transfer reactions and the much slower rates involved in protein folding. The experiments being developed are: Proton Transfer an experiment based on the CO2 carbonic acid bicarbonate equilibrium; Electron Transfer the reduction of cobalt (III) pentamine complexes by Fe(CN)64-, which demonstrates the discrete nature of ion pair formation followed by electron transfer; Ligand Substitution two proposed experiments, one that shows faster than expected rates for octahedral substitution, and the other that serves as an alternative to classic spectrophotometric multicomponent analysis by using time rather than wavelength as the discriminator; Protein Folding the determination of the rates of refolding of several proteins separating the various stages of the process by using a fluorescent probe as a marker for conformational changes; and Enzyme Kinetics chance's method applied to peroxidase, which demonstrates the formation of the enzyme substrate complex and its concurrent disappearance with the formation of product. The instrument is having a significant impact on the laboratory curriculum because it allows teachers to give students a better sense of fundamental chemical processes and kinetics while exposing them to state-of-the-art instrumentation. *
