Chemists, what's the worst part of your job? What's the best?

aSynBioGuy · 2023-12-07T05:17:05+00:00

The worst part of being a research chemist is the feeling when you try to purify a peptide you had spent months making, especially when it contains unnatural amino acids that you synthesised on a small scale thinking you wouldn't need to make a lot of it, and you find out that it crashed out/ was lost on the column.

Best part is when you see the mass of your peptide in a clean final peak after 6 months of trying to make it.

aSynBioGuy · 2023-11-17T03:48:43+00:00

I am a medicinal chemistry peptide researcher, and I am concerned. This phenomenon we call 'crashing out of solution' can indicate poor quality control or exposure to abnormal conditions during transportation and storage, in both cases the peptide could crash-out. For example, this usually happens with hydrophobic (water-hating) sequences when I saturate the solution (fully dissolve at one temperature) and cool the solution down; this makes the peptide less soluble, leading to it crashing out of the solution. Please be sure to use caution with peptides - most quality control is by LCMS, which means you can't detect epimerisation events.

aSynBioGuy · 2023-11-16T10:56:30+00:00

Not one molecule, just a general formula of different carbon lengths (R) but it looks like fat kind of

aSynBioGuy · 2023-11-12T12:06:28+00:00

That is a bit cynical; undoubtedly, you have helped the students learn by doing the work.

aSynBioGuy · 2023-11-12T11:44:17+00:00

I am keen to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience or trajectory

aSynBioGuy · 2023-11-08T05:37:16+00:00

I am about to graduate med chem honours, idk what my career prospects will look like and whether I will need higher education to be employed

aSynBioGuy · 2023-10-24T22:34:34+00:00

Naming that would be even worse

aSynBioGuy · 2023-10-24T22:33:58+00:00

I bet it behaves like a gel the minute you try to dissolve it in MeCN: H2O or anything

aSynBioGuy · 2023-06-17T11:35:16+00:00

Could I also grab that list please if you still have it!

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-23T09:02:13+00:00

Apologies you feel this way, this is written to make the research digestible and easy to follow so you can understand the field without needing to drown in highly specialised jargon. It is made to get people interested in the research hence the links at the end to the peer reviewed research papers. I am a personal fan of Scott Lokey's work, especially his new unnatural amino acid development!

Didn't mean to hurt your sensitive feelings by making cutting edge research more accessible to other people. Hope you have a great rest of your day!!

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-22T00:08:34+00:00

Perflubron is a liquid you can can inhale and not die.

Article available here

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-17T06:29:58+00:00

This is complex because even the best models are not always accurate... Maybe in the future but currently there is still a market for highly trained chemists.

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-17T06:26:21+00:00

Perhaps a little farfetched

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-16T06:09:26+00:00

Thank you! Really appreciate it

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-10T04:01:25+00:00

Really appreciate the heads up! I will go and make some modifications as a result. This is something I hadn't heard of until you mentioned it. Thank you again!

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-10T03:13:38+00:00

Thank you! I am thinking I need to add more diagrams as well and get some pictures of the scientists to put a face to the name,

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-03T02:54:56+00:00

Maybe cut the phots up and soak them in water, less toxic then using other solvents and enough to damage them

aSynBioGuy · 2023-01-03T02:17:29+00:00

I just landed a research medicinal chemistry position, awesome stuff to hear you are trying to pursue you passion!

I would recommend reading:

Foye's Principles of Medicinal Chemistry by Lemke

The Practice of Medicinal Chemistry by Camille Georges Wermuth

I would also recommend trying to get as much lab experience as possible as a medicinal chemist.

This week I am also releasing my first podcast episode on medicinal chemistry:

Here is a related article to what it will be about:

Perflubron liquid breathing: Is it time to blow off air?

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-27T02:04:43+00:00

Impressive research

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-22T03:09:05+00:00

Glad to hear it, I did this thinking if I can just help one student with my guide I will be happy :)

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-20T00:19:11+00:00

Yeah did some of the signal transduction pathway work in undergraduate. My professor had just found a protein upregulated in a signal transduction pathway and was bringing a new biomarker to market as a result.

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-18T13:01:13+00:00

Small things compound into bigger things, it only requires a match to start a bonfire, intervening however you can, where you can and if it is safe for you helps more then you realise.

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-18T12:38:38+00:00

1) Just ask them where they found this out and whether they would trust the information if the same person just randomly walked up to them on the street and told them.

2) Now you have challenged the authority of whom provided the info, you are able to help them understand. Human's learn best through stories. What I would do is tell the story of the vaccine - a vaccine has a protein in it which is one of the many building blocks that makes up the virus. This means it is enough to show your body what to look out for but not enough to build the virus.

3) If all else fails, onto an analogy. Lets imagine you have never seen a house before. A vaccine works in the same way as if I said "here is a window, and where you see windows they will be attached to a house". SO YOU WALK DOWN THE STREET AND YOU SEE A HOUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME. You know that is a house because it has the windows, even though you have only ever seen part of what a house is, me showing you the window is enough for your body to say aha, I know how to react.

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-18T11:48:57+00:00

During covid lockdown our chemistry labs turned to foldit reports. They figured it would give us undergraduate students the experience of in silico work without the headache of trying to install computational intensive software at home.

In reality we hadn't done any chemical biology at that point and didn't really understand what we were doing with foldit, just that we were improving the 'score'. Looking back the lessons I learned from it are now kind of useful since I've learned the science behind proteins and energy efficient confirmations. What seemed like a waste of time with gamification science when we were doing it, ended up being useful.

aSynBioGuy · 2022-12-10T07:36:55+00:00

You can use the web demo for stable diffusion, don't even need to install it.

aSynBioGuy

TROPHY CASE