Workshop in organic chemistry for non-chemists

Science course

  • Start: May 2, 2022 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • End: May 6, 2022 05:00 PM
  • Speaker: Sarah O'Connor, Jonathan Gershenzon
  • Directors Departments of Natural Product Biosynthesis and Biochemistry at MPI-CE
  • Location: MPI-CE
  • Room: Seminar room A1.009 and A1.011

Workshop in organic chemistry for non-chemists
2-6 May 2022
13:00-17:00 (we may not use all of this time)
by Sarah O’Connor, Jonathan Gershenzon

This short course is designed to help you become proficient in understanding and drawing the chemical reactions that are most important in Chemical Ecology. The goal is that by the end of the course you will be more confident in understanding how a molecule in biology might react.
On Tuesday, bring a laptop with Chemdraw installed. We will practice using Chemdraw on Tuesday.
Bring paper and a pen each day
. We will practice drawing chemical structures and mechanisms.

2 May, Monday:
Lecture: pKa values, nomenclature, electronegativity, fundamentals of bonding, resonance, functional groups that you will encounter in biological chemistry
Workshop: Looking at reactivity of biologically active molecules

3 May, Tuesday:
Workshop: How to make nice looking chemdraw structures, and using the features of chemdraw
Lecture: Reactions of carbonyl chemistry

4 May, Wednesday:
Lecture: Common enzyme mechanisms in natural products (serine proteases, reductases, polyketide synthases)
Workshop: Drawing out an enzymatic mechanism

5 May, Thursday:
Lecture: Enzyme mechanisms of natural products, part 2 (terpene synthases, cytochrome P450s, other priorities?)
Workshop: Another mechanism to draw

6 May, Friday:
Lecture: Cool chemical probes in chemical biology and how they work (click chemistry, Michael acceptors, activity based protein profiling)
Workshop: Predicting where probes will react

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