• Question: What is your favourite chemical reaction?

    Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl, Nimesh, Sandra on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nimesh Mistry

      Nimesh Mistry answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      My favourite chemical reaction is one I’ve helped develop called the Maitland-Japp reaction. It’s basically loads of chemical reactions that happens in one pot and was the key reaction for making an anticancer molecule that I was trying to make.

      It was my favourite because I was part of the team of scientists developing it, so we became the world experts of that reaction. To make it work well, I had to use lots of chemistry that I had learnt at undergrad level. It was also technically challenging to perform which I like too. I had to flame dry the glassware (heat with bunsen burner under nitrogen balloon, run the reaction at -78 degrees and use syringe needles to mix all the solutions). It also went lots of nice colours to indicate if stages of the reaction was working well. For example, it the titanium tetrachloride was syringed in correctly, the reaction would go red.

    • Photo: Anita Thomas

      Anita Thomas answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I’m currently studying how arginine is metabolised by two opposing enzymes, arginase (as part of the urea cycle) and nitric oxide synthase (as part of the citrulline cycle). It’s like seeing a war going on within each cell!

    • Photo: Amy Monaghan

      Amy Monaghan answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      My favourite reaction is the luciferase reaction that gives off light. There’s a picture of the reaction if you follow the link here:

      http://www.piercenet.com/product/pierce-firefly-luciferase-glow-assay-kit

      Without it my whole project wouldn’t exist and it would be incredibly difficult to work out how a lot of proteins in the human body respond to both drugs and natural chemicals that your body producrd

    • Photo: Daryl Jones

      Daryl Jones answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      My favourite chemical reaction is when i add bleach to a substance called ECL. It lights up bright blue!! It’s like when you have a glow stick and snap it- the chemicals come together and glow- but when i do it in the lab it’s SO much brighter 🙂 it’s awesome

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