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Devac  ·  945 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 25, 2021

Simplified/ELI15 ahead. Chemists: don't hate on me.

This project is about modeling a 'designer catalyst' that'll be enantioselective for specific synthesis. What's that? If you have a chiral compound (left or right-handed molecules with a mirror symmetry), unless we're talking about evolved mechanisms, when you synthesize it in the lab, it'll be a racemic mixture, 50:50 of left and right-handed enantiomers. Metaloorganics are great candidates for preferentially skewing a reaction towards one enantiomer over another, but their applications are much broader than that. Grignard reagent being one of the oldest flagship fussy ones. Seriously, after working with it a few times, I think it breaks down if you even mention water around it.

As to specific applications, though, I'm very lucky to be in a fairly basic research-focused environment. There's something on the funding application, I'm sure, and it is a fertile ground for pharmacological applications, but we kinda get to play around and look for commonalities in the mechanism. My job is part lab, part wrangling the math for simulations.

Apart from carbon-metal bonds, it has almost nothing to do with my cuprate superconductor stuff. Both are fun, tho!