The news

So I have been working in the lab now for two and a half weeks. Mainly I have been repeating the same kind of process everyday. Most of the reactions I am doing are overnight reactions so I set them up in the afternoon and work them up ( separate the different components, run tests to see if these components have reacted, interpret the graphs from the tests) the next morning. It is quite fun! I have two different phosphine ligands, an imidizol and a pyradine, and I am attaching them to a known catalyst, PDT-cat, which I actually synthesized at the beginning with a uv reaction. So, last Friday I actually learned that with the imidizol reaction I had collected the wrong material and that the material I collected was actually worthless. My compound was actually not polar at all so it did not move when i ran a column in hexanes to separate the compounds. On Friday, the bands wouldn't move so I made the solvent more polar by adding dichloromethane and suddenly there was a nice purple band. It was quite surprising. But know, when I reran all the tests, I discovered that this purple band was the mono substituted imidizol PDT-cat, and that it was quite similar to the pyradine!