Week 8: DNAN, TNT and Calibration Curves

This week I spent a lot of time working on DNAN to try to figure out what is going on at the end of the reaction. 

As you can see, the reaction kinetics are under the control of the iron porphyrin and cysteine reduction reaction right up until the DNAN concentration has dropped to approximately 10uM. At this point, the reaction becomes a smoothy dropping curve, and is under the contraol of something that we do not know about yet. We are not sure if the reduction products of the DNAN is reacting with the DNAN itself, or it there is something else entirely going on. This could be problematic for use in our QSAR predictions, but since the reaction follows the correct reduction kinetics for quite a long time, we do understand what is going on at the beginning of the reaction, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. 

I also re-did a bunch of TNT trials this week in hopes that they would turn out looking better than they did at the beginning of the 10 weeks because I am better at the method now. I have not gotten results yet for those because I have had to run extremely long HPLC analyses because we needed to separate TNT from a product peak that was appearing right next to the TNT peak, causing the peak to seem bigger than it actually was. Hopefully when I get the data from those runs, I wil be able to be more confident in my current TNT data. 

Next week I move on to testing 1,3-Dinitrobenzene, and I will be working on writing my final paper and presentation. I will also be organizing data so that it is usable and clear for Ali to understand when I am not here anymore. Wish me a good week 9! 

-Hayley