Week 1 - Lab Work

Tomorrow will mark one week since I arrived here in Fribourg. It's been a very long (but good!) week. Adjusting to a new city in a new country is a lot, but the research group has been very welcoming.




I'm working in the lab with a swiss PhD student named Jocelyn. We get along well, and I'm really enjoying learning about his research. Jocelyn latest project is the investigation of bimetallic salen complexes and their properties. The whole Fromm group is interested in the anti-microbial/bacterial properties of different compounds. This week I synthesized the starting salen ligand and created zinc, copper, and silver coordination compounds with it. Here are some pictures and additional details:

This is the structure of the salen ligand. Its just a boring yellow powder so I didn't include a picture of it, I also may have forgotten to take a picture of it. The metals are added first to the space between the two nitrogens (N) and alcohols (OH). This is the preferred site for the metals to coordinate. Next week we will add a second metal to the lower half of the molecule. It will (hopefully) coordinate with the alcohols and oxygens (O).


 

This is the zinc-salen ligand. Under a UV light it fluoresces (glows)! This also provides a way for us to help verify that we have in fact created a new compound, as the salen ligand alone does not fluoresce. 

Monday is a national holiday, so I have the day off. 3 day weekend! I plan to go hiking nearby, although I'm not sure where yet. Thank you for reading, see you next week.


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