Brilliant, so thanks very much Saskia for the introduction. As Saskia's mentioned I'm a third year DPhil student working in the research group of Professor Darren Dixon and hopefully these talks will just give a bit of a flavour of the sort of really exciting academic research that occurs after the undergraduate degree. So this is frontline chemistry to really try and solve some of the most pressing problems that face humanity and by the end of my talk hopefully I'll have made clear the connection between these sorts of fearsome organic molecules, the beautiful organisms that produce them, and then kind of most importantly how all of the knowledge from that links to making more medicines more effective to ultimately improve people's qualities of life.
Now before we get into all of that just a little bit of a background about me. So I grew up in Essex, North Essex, near Cambridgeshire and so went to secondary school in Cambridgeshire. and stayed at the same school throughout my secondary school and it was here that I had a really inspiring chemistry teacher and I was really drawn to the nature of the problem solving in chemistry and we did a lot of kind of problem solving outside the class and sure enough I applied to study chemistry at university and was fortunate enough to be accepted to read chemistry at University College in Oxford and I love my four-year degree here.
And over the first three years, which is quite heavy on the theoretical chemistry, I was really drawn to organic chemistry. And so in the final year where the Oxford Chemistry course specialises in giving students a chance to do a year-long research project that contributes towards their masters in chemistry, I decided to specialise in organic chemistry and I applied to work in the group of Professor Darren Dixon. and again love this year of research and so applied to stay in this group and I enrolled in the synthesis for biology and medicine DPhil. So this DPhil program uses organic synthesis and chemical reactions to solve some of the really major issues in biology and medicine and that's where I am today.
Now throughout the talk there's going to be quite a lot of chemical structures and I'm aware that people might be at different points in the A-level course. So by way of sort of introduction or maybe refresher, if you've already covered it, it's important that we go over the idea of skeletal formulae. So everyone will be familiar with this way of representing molecules where we show every single atom, but quite quickly as molecules become more complex it becomes pretty difficult to understand what this representation is showing. So we simplify that down, we use simple lines to represent carbon-carbon bonds or carbon-carbon double bonds.
We show any interesting atoms like oxygen or nitrogen, and then all of the hydrogens are implicit. So we work out how many hydrogens there are. We know, for example, that carbon is bonded to four different things.
So if we see one line coming out of a single point like this, we know that there must be three hydrogens implicitly bonded to this carbon. And that way we can simplify. our structures significantly.
Now the other bit of background that I'd like to introduce people to is the idea of total synthesis. So some people might be familiar with the word synthesis. In this context it literally just means putting together molecules to make more complex, more interesting molecules. The total part of that total synthesis is quite important and what it means is that we're starting from very simple commercially available precursors.
So what that ends up looking like. is this sort of scheme. So we know what chemicals are available to us and we might know what we want to make. It might have interesting properties or a really interesting structure, but how we get between them is unknown. And that's what the field of synthesis is really all about.
And it tends to look something like this. So each arrow here represents what we call a step. It's typically a chemical reaction that interchanges one intermediate for another. And to get from commercially available materials to something that we really want to make is typically many and often many many steps. Now the talk is essentially about natural product synthesis so we should definitely underline what exactly is a natural product and people will have come across many of these probably already in their GCSE and their A-level science.
It's essentially any compound that is produced by living organisms. but there are some distinctions so we distinguish between primary and secondary metabolites at the top here i've shown some primary metabolites these are compounds which we observe in pretty much every living organism or across huge variety of living organisms. These are your amino acids, your sugars, maybe your nucleic acids that go towards making DNA, whereas your secondary metabolites tend to be a lot more specialized. So these tend to be observed in single species of organisms or maybe single families of organisms, and they're highly specialized to solving particular problems that that organism faces. So these could be things like pheromones, antibiotics, toxins, and I've tried to depict just a few of them down here at the bottom to show the variety of compounds that we have in this secondary metabolite class.
And these are the ones that are really interesting to us natural product chemists. Why is all of this important? Well, I'll illustrate that with a couple of very prominent cases. If we go back to the early 20th century, we've got the penicillins.
So penicillins, hopefully everyone on the call will have heard of today, they were the first antibiotic used to treat staphylococci and streptococci bacteria. And this discovery that these sorts of bacterial infections could be treated had a profound effect on modern medicine. They were discovered kind of in the late 19th century and then first used to treat patients in the early 20th century. and although it's impossible to pin an exact number on exactly how many people have had their lives saved because of these medicines it's typically quoted in the hundreds of millions so a really profound impact there from a natural product if we go a little bit later in the 20th century in the early 21st century there's an example that people might not be quite so familiar with so this molecule here is artemisin and artemisin is a famous and very potent anti-malarial treatment and it's particularly prominent because some of the previously dominant treatments for malaria were rapidly um it was rapidly being observed that there was resistance to some of these treatments and artemisin was a potential treatment to get around that resistance now artemisin comes from the sweet wormwood tree it comes from the bark and since its discovery it has easily saved millions and millions of lives the discovery of artemisin was so prominent that the discoverer was awarded with a Nobel Prize.
So the chemist Yu Yu discovered it in 1970s and then was awarded with a Nobel Prize in 20, I think it was 2015. But it is worth just giving a shout out to Li Shijian, who was a Chinese apothecary from the 16th century and he was the first reported, it was the first report of the bark of the sweet wyrmwood tree being used to treat malaria. So these are two historical examples of where medical products have been used in drug discovery. But where does the field of drug discovery stand now? It's a pressing question to all of us.
And it turns out it's getting harder and harder to produce drugs. Typically it's quoted that it costs one billion dollars to bring a drug from the first idea to bring it to market. And some people estimate that that's even higher, up to 2.8, nearly three billion dollars.
And what that means is that If it costs that much to develop a drug, then that drug has got to make that much money in return so that the companies producing these drugs can keep running. And if we look at exactly what that lead molecule has to go through to become an actual regulated drug, we begin to see why it's so complex. We begin at a stage where literally thousands of compounds will be screened to see if they interact with a biomolecule of interest. This could be a protein responsible for a disease for example and after validating which compounds bind well to that protein they're then treated to living organisms or maybe single cells moving up to tissues and the compounds have got to demonstrate effectiveness in those scenarios as well and once it's shown that it's not toxic and that it does actually treat the disease in simple modern systems it then is finally administered to humans and we then have three rounds of treating humans in bigger and bigger scale trials and at each stage it's constantly monitored for safety and also for effectiveness ultimately this drug has to be effective and it's got to be more effective than what's already out there on the market and after all of this and we're looking at typically 10 to 15 years at this point the drug needs to be regulated and it's got to be shown that it is better than what's on the market it offers something new Now if we depict all that slightly differently, this graph showing a pretty clear downwards trend.
is the number of drugs per billion US dollars of research and development spending. Notice that the y-axis is logarithmic so this is an even steeper beginning and we're kind of petering out towards the bottom here. So it's quite clear that finding new drugs is challenging and it really is getting harder. So if we want to try and reverse this trend, we want to try and make it easier to find new drugs, then we've got to look at the current drugs on the market and look for things that might be causing those issues. So here, if we look at three of the top selling drugs in 2021, and we try and look for similarities between them, the first thing that jumps out to me as a chemist is, there's a really high number of carbon-carbon double bonds.
And the thing about carbon-carbon double bonds that anyone who has studied a little bit of the shape of molecules knows is that it means that the molecules are flat. So the three atoms connected to a carbon, connected to a double bonded carbon, are all arranged in a flipped geometry. And what that means is that in a molecule like a pixaband here, where we've got a really large number of double bonded carbons, the molecule itself is flat.
And I'll try and justify that with quite a crude model here that's showing us a 3D representation of that molecule. And you can see if we orient it on its side that it really is quite flat. Now the problem with that is that the enzymes and the biomolecules which we're trying to target are very three-dimensional so these are composed of your amino acids and their three-dimensional structure is where they get their properties from. If we look at natural products and these are three natural product inspired drugs that were approved in 2021 we see slightly different trends so we see that there are far more saturated carbons so saturated carbons have a tetrahedral arrangement.
around them. So you can perform the same sort of analysis with these drugs and you can try and visualize how three-dimensional these are and it turns out that they are much more three-dimensional and so they're better able to interact with these three-dimensional biomolecules, for example the proteins of question. And if we try and represent that with voxelosporin, a very complex natural product here, it almost looks like a globular protein so you really can see why these natural products are more three-dimensional.
Now, how do we go about finding a natural product? Well, this is the work of chemists who get to travel a lot more than I do. These are isolation chemists who get to go all over the world looking for organisms of interest.
And they find these organisms and they harvest them from their natural environment. And I've shown three organisms of interest here. So this relative of. daisies, a fungus in the center here and the Artemisia annua, that sweet wormwood tree that we were talking about earlier.
Then we've got to try and purify any natural products that are in them out and this is a multi-stage process so you might begin by trying to separate water soluble and oil soluble compounds and you might look at chromatography. So some of you might have been introduced to chromatography in your experimental course. So this is silica gel chromatography and it's a really powerful way of separating individual compounds and if that doesn't work we can go to even more high-tech forms of purification. This is called high performance liquid chromatography and it's a very powerful way of separating compounds. Now when we have our pure compound we then turn to the analysis of that compound and we run it through a series of spectroscopic methods.
So these are things like infrared spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy, which we'll talk a bit more about later. And then with a lot of scratching of your head, you can work out the structure of these molecules. So at the top here, we've got pyrethrin-1, isolated from this tannicetum species, and this is a very powerful insecticide. In the centre here, we've got plurimutalin, a very promising antibiotic that shows effectiveness against some of the resistant strains of bacteria that are in the medical profession at the moment. And then at the bottom, you'll recognize Artemis and the potent antimalarium that we talked about earlier.
So if we can just turn to nature and take it straight from nature, then why do we need chemical synthesis? And I'll try to illustrate that point with a very famous example where it's not just really explaining why we need synthesis, but also why we need synthesis and biology. to work in tandem with each other to solve these really challenging problems.
So the case study in question is Taxol, this kind of terrifying looking natural product with a huge amount of complexity in it. And so the natural product is called Taxol, but the drug name is actually Taxel. And in the 70s, it was discovered that this natural product had very potent activity against ovarian cancer.
It comes from the Pacific yew tree in China. And the problem was that as the bioactivity of this molecule became more and more prominent, and more and more researchers around the world wanted to experiment with this treatment, the demand for that Pacific yew tree became higher and higher. So by 1977 there were literally thousands of pounds of this bark being ordered.
The problem is it's not easy to farm that yew tree and the natural product is present in only very small quantities. So quite quickly that tree became endangered and it was clear that we needed a solution to this problem. Sure enough, chemical synthesis tried to answer this problem and by 1992 there were 30 academic groups working on this problem.
Now just to put that into context, there is no molecule around today that has this sort of academic research devoted to it, this sort of, yeah, this amount of focus placed on it shortly after all of this energy had been spent on it. a group from Florida State University got to the end so they managed to make this natural product. If you remember the diagram on one of the early slides that total synthesis scheme going from blob to blob along these chemical intermediates it involved 46 of those steps so 46 of those arrows and it was a really impressive achievement and here's the group celebrating that achievement.
Now it is worth mentioning that since that landmark achievement there have been six reported reported syntheses of this really complex natural product then it's also worth noting that after all of these steps after those 46 steps that research group managed to produce 11.6 milligrams of taxon to put that into context that's not even enough for one person's treatment once the dose is typically tens to hundreds of milligrams and it's administered multiple times so it's clear that chemical synthesis is kind of it's almost there it just needs it it needs something else so they needed a solution and this is where a little bit of help from biology comes in so a different natural product d-acetyl bacotin was isolated from the far more easily farmed european nutrient so the european nutrient can be farmed it's far more common and it has a much higher yield of this this natural product And because of all the work that the synthetic chemists had done on the total synthesis of Taxol, they knew that they could go from this quite late intermediate, this very advanced structure, to the final natural one. Now the details here aren't important, but if you look at just the number of arrows, these are the number of steps, and you can see that whereas the original synthesis of Taxol was 46 steps, in this semi-synthetic approach we've got basically nine steps. and we can get to that natural product. To underline just how profound that discovery was, in 2017 there were 2,600 kilograms produced of the natural product and that brought in a massive revenue for the drug companies involved.
Now more importantly being able to access that level, that amount of material meant that the treatment could be approved for breast, it was already approved for ovarian but also lung and Kaposi's sarcoma cancer. So where do we fit into all of that? Here in the research group that I work in, the Dixon group in Oxford.
Well, Darren's been, Darren, my supervisor, has been interested in natural product synthesis for a very long time because the molecules that we observe in natural products tend to be, tend to be very unique and complex. As a result, trying to make them in the lab really stretches and challenges the chemical reactions we have at our disposal. So not only do they often have very interesting properties, but also we can use these token syntheses to try and develop new chemistry that can be used all over chemical synthesis.
Just to maybe give a bit of background of some of the sort of structures that we've produced in the group in the past, I'll show a few of them. So manzamine A was synthesized in 2012 by the group. This comes from a marine sponge of Okinawa, a Japanese island, and it really has a very... broad stream of properties right through from insecticidal to antibacterial and a host of other properties.
It's changing tacks slightly. A few years ago in the group Himalensin A was produced. Now this was isolated from a Nepalese mountain shrub so it couldn't be more different than the marine sponge of Okinawa. Now in this case the total synthesis was less about getting to a particular natural product but it was more about using this synthetic campaign to try and develop new chemical reactions that could hopefully be used more widely in other chemical synthesis and then finally i'm going to talk about nacodamarin a so you'll notice some similarities between nacodamarin a and manzamine a here this kind of this long chain with the double bond in the middle for example and that's because they both come from marine sponges off canal now nacodamarin a shows cytotoxic activity against murine lymphoma but also what was interesting about this project was that it was run in collaboration with a group from um MIT in Boston and Boston College and so this was a really exciting collaboration across the Atlantic Ocean but what do these molecules have in common are they completely grounded is there a theme connecting now the first thing that sort of jumps out to me is that they will have nitrogens in that might not seem strange at first but it's actually quite difficult to introduce nitrogens into molecules nitrogen molecules in this case amines are quite prone to oxidation and decomposition in air therefore if we can develop new routes to making these sorts of amines then that can have quite a profound impact across chemical synthesis but there's another key connection between all of these molecules and to illustrate that i've got a little bit of a green teaser on the next slide so we begin with part one just take a couple of seconds to think to yourself are these molecules the same some of you might have come across this concept before so if you're giving that a little bit of thought you may want to part two looks like a slightly similar question and sure enough if you try and see whether these molecules in both part one and part two are the same. You see that actually they're both depicting different molecules.
So these are isomers and we call them optical isomers. This might be a refresher for some people who have covered optical isomers in the course already, but for anybody who doesn't believe me that these two molecules are different, if we take this molecule on the right hand side and we rotate it 180 degrees in a rotation axis here, I've shown you that, so that's the left hand side molecule. and then this is the rotated molecule on the right hand side and then we try and overlay those two molecules or as we chemists like to say we want to superimpose them we see that in this molecule on the right hand side we have a hydrogen coming towards us and on the left hand side we have an oxygen an OH coming towards us and we see that these molecules don't superimpose therefore they can't be the same molecule and so the connecting theme between these natural products is that they of this property of optical isomerization.
And what we like to call that property is chirality. So chirality, for anybody who hasn't come across the concept before, is an inherent symmetry property of an object. I sometimes think it's a bit more intuitive to think that it's almost like an asymmetric property of an object.
And what it means is that the object cannot be superimposed on its mirror image. So I've shown us a generic scheme of what that means in the case of molecules or in the case of carbon atoms bonded to four different groups. But of course, this concept can translate outside of chemistry. And the famous example is your hands. So your hands, if we chop them off, would be examples of optical isomers.
Your hands are chiral. And as chemists, we call these non-superimposable mirror images enantiomers. and if we want to make one enantiomer instead of the other we want to select for one enantiomer rather than the other then the chemistry we need to use is called enantioselectivity so if we want to make these natural products as a single enantiomer then we need enantioselective chemistry or put differently how do we make this molecule this is melenzane the one of the natural products i showed a couple of slides back and not this it's enantiomer And the answer is that if we want to go from something a-chiral, not chiral, to something that's chiral, and we want that chiral product to be a single enantiomer, then we need to use something chiral to do that chemistry.
Now the details of this aren't hugely important, but what we end up needing to use are very carefully optimized and controlled chiral catalysts. So we start from this left hand side starting material. And if you look carefully, you'll recognise that this isn't a chiral molecule, it's a chiral. And we use a specialised chiral catalyst to render this molecule chiral as a single enantiomer. And then we can do what's called downstream chemistry on this molecule.
We can hopefully lock that structure into a single enantiomer of a chiral product. And this deals all the reaction. The details aren't important.
It's something that you'll cover with your undergraduate chemistry. but it's a very good way of making two carbon-carbon bonds and advancing towards the product that we want. At this point, a friend of mine, Dr. Yao Shi, inherited this project, and he still had to go a very long way to get from this chiral intermediate to the natural product.
In fact, it took 13 more steps to get to that natural product, but he made it in the end. And this is a really big celebration. These sorts of projects take literally years and years to complete.
because it's so difficult to control this molecular scale reactivity. So we have one way of making chiral molecules as single enantiomers. Now does that mean that we can translate that to all sorts of natural products?
Well no. It tends to be that enantioselective chemistry tends to be very specialised for particular products, so if we want to make new structures we need new approaches. and we in the group were drawn to this natural product shown here, Medangamine E, comes from marine sea sponges isolated off the coast of Papua New Guinea and this is a natural product that I spent the first year of my PhD working on. So part of the team involved in this natural product synthesis included Dr Shinya Shion, a Japanese postdoc working in Darren's group. This is my supervisor Darren shown here at a conference with Shinya.
And then in the final year of the project, there was me working on the synthesis, along with a colleague of mine, Ken, who used computational modelling to try and simulate some of the really cool chemistry that we were doing. Now if I just sort of show someone this molecule and ask them how would you go about making it, it's not at all that easy, and we need a sort of a conceptual framework for how we go about making molecules. and the answer is we go backwards so we know that the final natural product is what we want to make and so how we get there the fastest way to work out how to get there is to kind of go backwards and we want to break off parts of this molecule to get to simpler and simpler intermediates so we begin by and again i should add the details here aren't important we use chemical reactions that we know that we're taught to simplify the molecule down over a number of steps typically breaking apart these kind of complex ring structures.
Now you'll remember that the purpose of this synthesis was to develop new enantioselective chemistry, so we wanted to find a way to go from an achiral material to a single enantiomer of a chiral product, and we chose this reaction to be that kind of innovative step. We thought it would be a very powerful way to advance towards the natural products that we want. And it would set as many of these chiral centers as we want to get in the molecule. Now, from this achiral starting material, just a few more steps going backwards took us to a simple commercially available molecule. And this idea of going backwards has a name.
It's a very powerful conceptual framework. We call it retrosynthesis, literally synthesis, but going backwards. and the idea behind it is that it's a it's kind of a thought experiment it's a theoretical backward synthesis and it helps us work out which uh bonds to break and which molecules to combine that get us from those commercially available starting materials to the natural product as quickly as possible and two of the chemists who were most famous for developing this uh this area both won uh nobel prizes for their contributions to the field and uh by way of a bit of a kind of fanboy moment this was me a few years ago getting to hold Sir Robert Robinson's Nobel Prize which is held at Magdalen College in Oxford. Now I wouldn't be presenting this work to you today if it didn't kind of have a happy ending and after I joined the project after it had been running for many years I worked on it for a year first year of my PhD and we did manage to make synthetic modangabine E. So again recall that original total synthesis diagram of going from one intermediate to another over a number of steps our synthesis of modangabine E took 30 steps including all of the other work that other chemists have put on this project.
It was about eight years worth of work. And that key step, the enantioselective chemistry that was the purpose of the original project, was scaled up to five grams. Now for context, that's actually a huge amount to perform in the laboratory, especially for such complex reactions. We got a very good yield in that chemistry and we got 99 percent EE.
Now, EE... is a measure of how enantioselective that chemistry is. So 99% is very good.
After all of these 30 steps we managed to make 5 mg of Modangamini and that was just enough to prove that we had made a natural product. So some people might not be familiar with NMR and some people might need just a quick reminder. So NMR stands for Nucleomagnetic Resonance and it's a spectroscopic method.
it tells us about the environment of magnetically active nuclei. Now the most common of those magnetically active nuclei is hydrogen-1 or a proton. So when you learn a little bit more about this NMR spectroscopy you can take a proton spectrum like a hydrogen-1 NMR spectrum as shown on the right hand side here and you can almost read it like a map so long as you know roughly what sort of molecule you're expecting. So at the top here is shown my spectra of synthetic medangabini, and we wanted to match it to a literature report making the same compound. And if you zoom in or if you can squint, then you can see that these are essentially exactly the same.
So we confirmed that we had made the natural product. And this was a big cause for celebration in the group and was the culmination of nearly eight years worth of work. So after completing that, what am I working on now?
So we're looking at a natural product daffodil geronim B. You'll see it looks quite different to medangabine E. In this case, it's isolated from a Himalayan mountain shrub called daftophilum androsomosum. And when the chemists isolated this for the first time, they demonstrated that it showed quite weak platelet aggregation properties, which could sort of go into a promising area of biology. activity of its own.
But more interestingly, it's just the fact that so little was isolated originally because it's present in such small quantities in these plants that further tests couldn't be carried out. So the full bioactive profile of this molecule couldn't really be determined properly. Now, if we want to make this molecule, we perform the same retrosynthetic analysis.
So the same idea of going backwards. Again, the details are hugely important. We begin by appreciating what functional groups present in the molecule.
So you'll recognise many of these names, ketones, esters, alkenes, alcohols, amines. And throughout our undergraduate and postgraduate chemistry, and even your A level chemistry, you'll be taught different reactions that can give us these functional groups. And again, do the same process of breaking it apart into simpler and simpler fragments until hopefully we end up with something that we can buy and then we go in the forwards direction we get in the lab go and try and make it going in the forwards direction so that's what's next for me but what's next for the field so we have this kind of saying there's the age of feasibility this is question one can we make anything with enough time and money can we make any natural product that exists in nature. But question two here is a lot more interesting. It's how efficiently can we make it?
So everyone would be aware of just how pressing the climate crisis is at the moment, and a lot of the chemicals that we combine in the lab come from petrochemicals, so that their origins are crude oil. So we really want to try and minimize the amounts that we're using, particularly when it comes to the solvents that we use in the lab. So solvents tend to, you dissolve a small amount of your compound in a really large amount of the solvent.
Added to that, many of the reagents and the chemicals that we use in the lab can be toxic or they can be environmentally damaging or they can come from environmentally scarce sources. So we want to try and minimise them and come up with greener alternatives. And this is really where the field should be moving.
How can we make really interesting and useful molecules efficiently with with as little damage to our planet as possible? And just to kind of summarize what the field has achieved in the last 50 years or so, literally 50 years ago, vitamin B12 was synthesized by a brilliant international collaboration. This is one of the most famous total syntheses in history. And it's just so impressive that we can make this in the lab, but maybe it's even more impressive that a number of organisms can produce it. this molecule in seconds without even thinking about it.
A few more that have been made recently, so some really congested small and highly oxygenated molecules have been made, some more complex molecules with very very promising bioactive properties have also been made and then some natural products still remain just beyond our grasp, so mitotoxin here. has had a huge amount of synthetic effort put into it. So this really addresses question one, can we make anything?
And it remains an unanswered question. Some people would say that with enough money and PhD students, we can't make anything. Now, I find that after a talk like this, it's sometimes hard to remember that organic chemistry is a completely practical discipline.
So I am in the lab pretty much every day working on reactions practically and it's always exciting. We always see new things come up and it's sometimes hard to forget that when you see a presentation of kind of flat structures on the page with black lines connecting the bonds. But those structures, those chemicals are real.
They are real substances. And so I've tried to depict some of the things that I've seen in the last year in the lab that brighten up our day. So that could be white solids that come out as crystalline forms in all sorts of beautiful shapes. So if you can see, we've got little spider-like shapes here.
We've got sheets here and then we've got snowflake-like structures here and here. We deal with all sorts of beautiful, colourful transition metals, so cobalt complex hail. and then copper complexes here and here and then this beautiful orange compound this is an anion that sits on a carbon atom next to a phosphorus and it gives this beautiful orange glow and then we've also got iodine vapors up here the experimental setups that we use are also pretty exciting so this is a photo of my fume hood on a typical day sometimes less messy sometimes it is a bit messy and the first thing that jumps out at me is the amount pipe work that we've got going on in this fume head and the reason we have so much so many pipes going everywhere is that some chemical reactions are very sensitive to air so the oxygen and the water that's in the air can destroy your reaction completely and because of that we want to keep our reactions under nitrogen and inert gas or argon which is very good at keeping the reaction in there another way of doing that is filling balloons with nitrogen or argon and then you can simply attach your balloon to your reaction.
These are the fetching goggles that I'm wearing in the top left hand corner. They have UV protection so if we're using UV light to do what's called photochemistry, so when you shine high powered electromagnetic radiation on your reaction it can sometimes get the molecules to do really interesting unusual reactions. And then I want to end just by talking about this bottom right hand image.
Many of you will have covered TLC or thin layer chromatography in your experimental courses. And I remember from school, the typical experiment is you get some colorful cake dye and you see it separate into different compounds. And it's hard to believe that that really is used in practical academic research.
But here's me telling you now it really is. So we use TLC every single day and it's our number one way of monitoring reactions. this TLC plate in particular is the one that showed that I had made medangivine for the first time so that was a particularly exciting one for me okay so to conclude quite simply put nature is an absolutely brilliant chemist it's got awesome chemical machinery that can construct molecules that we spend years and years trying to make and those molecules have immense bioactive properties if we really want to solve some of the prominent issues facing medicine and facing humanity then we can get a leg up and we can start with inspiration from nature. One discipline in all of that work is natural product synthesis and that's the field that I'm in and it's incredibly exciting and it really is essential to answering some of these questions and solving some of these problems.
Just to kind of conclude Some of the topics that might crop up in your A-level courses that we've gone through today include skeletal formulae. These are an incredibly powerful way of depicting molecules. The idea of optical isomers and chirality and then the kind of university extension of that is the idea of enantioselectivity. And then all of this is underpinned by experimental methods. So how do you purify molecules and then how do you work out what you've made?
So that's your purification and your analytical methods. So that brings me to the end of my talk. I need to thank my industrial sponsors.
So an industrial consortium support my studentship in collaboration with Magdalen College. Alongside that, I need to thank Darren, my supervisor, who constantly provides help, answers to my questions and sometimes more questions to my questions that need to be gone unanswered. And then, of course, everyone in the group is always an immense help.
it's brilliant having such an exciting team of colleagues that we can bounce ideas off and of course thank you everyone for listening to that talk and yeah I'd be welcome I'd welcome any questions at this point thanks very much