Knew it wasn't going to be great (had an e-mail last night from a team member saying they wanted to go ahead and try and get lots more chemistry done and just hope that we have time!). Luckily I was in the position where this was kind of irrelevant to me as I was still in the middle of another synthesis (because I'd spent too much time helping others out last week!) and that therefore took priority.
The good news was, I had some product. (very good because 2 of us were aiming to isolate this particular species, and we'd been told one had failed and one had succeeded, but not which one was which!). Once again the "simple" process of crystallising my product took me ages. Stupid thing wouldn't dissolve in any of the solvents it really should have done. Got there in the end though...
It looked like I had a lot of product but once I'd done an NMR and melting point suddenly I didn't have very much (really annoying given that my product burnt in the MP apparatus so I don't actually have a melting point..), managed to do a solution IR, and then had to vac it down to get my product back - managed to submit 2 mg (rather than the desired 3-5 mg) for testing to GSK, pending a good NMR. Needless to say this was a lot of effort for not much back.
Lunchtime came and I was feeling rather tired and broken (although our GSK mentor did say well done for getting a product and even said he was proud of me - cue warm feeling inside!). With lunch I had many painkillers, this turned out to not be such a great idea. They've never affected me quite so much before, so don't know if other factors were coming in to play, but I was definitely not awake. Struggled to even stand up right for a while! But I persevered (even when one of my team mates suggested going home), and managed to work up 2 reactions and get them ready for columning, which our team had to do manually because te machine had broken again. Definitely didn't have time for that!
Tomorrow looks like we might be panicking a bit. Have 4 or 5 products to isolate between us, plus we need to get all our characterisation done and tidy up our cupboards! Then planning a meeting Wednesday to collate all of out results so that we can write up our reports! On the plus side...3 hours in the lab tomorrow morning and that's it. No more undergrad labs for me - ever!
So much for keeping it short today!
You don't have a melting point but you can still say 'x°C (decomposed)'.
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