This Presidential Young Investigator Award given in the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program provides support for the work of Dr. Banita White Brown at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This work is focused on nitrogen-pivot lariat ethers which possess one or more sidearms appended to the nitrogen atom(s) of a macrocyclic azacrown ether. These lariat ethers will be evaluated for efficacy as mimics of naturally occurring ionophores. The goal of this research program is to synthesize several peptide derivatives of one- and two-armed nitrogen-pivot lariat ethers in order to evaluate calcium(II) binding constants using circular dichroism measurements and to characterize the sequence of binding.
