Week 4

Wednesday 24/3

I’m starting to get into the swing of things, though I’m still getting too distracted too easily. MonARCH and Massive are both back online, so I’m using both to try and finish off these benchmarking jobs. They aren’t all playing nicely though, but I’m coaxing them along as best I can in my free time.

I’ve started work on the green chem assignment and have been writing notes for main group and metallosupramolecular, though I’m really not sure what to do for the metallosupramolecular assignment…

Thursday 25/3

I had a meeting about the metallosupramolecular assignment and came up with a kind of silly but interesting idea of attaching a bunch of ligands to the outside of a macrocycle and using rotational spectroscopy to determine what metal isotopes (maybe \(\ce{^{99m}Tc}\)?) are bound to the ligands.

If these are loosely bound, then you could use this to determine the non-selective concentration of ions in solution, whereas if these are strongly bound you could use them to determine the amount of \(\ce{^{99m}Tc/^99Mo (98.9063/98.9077au)}\) in solution.

\(\ce{^{99m}Tc^{IV}}\)formation

The process starts with \(\ce{^99MoO4^{2-}}\) (66h half life), which is transported to hospitals, decaying through \(\beta\) and \(\bar v_e\) decay (\(\ce{e-}\)/electron anti-neutrino) along the way to give \(\ce{^{99m}TcO4-}\) (pertechnetate), which is extracted from the solution using column chromatography, where the \(\ce{^99MoO4^{2-}}\) is adsorbed on to the alumina column (\(\ce{Al2O3}\)) and the \(\ce{^{99m}TcO4-}\) is eluted out with saline. The \(\ce{^{99m}TcO4-}\) has a +7 oxidation state and is reduced to \(\ce{^{99m}Tc^{IV}}\) or \(\ce{^{99m}Tc^{III}}\) to be bound with a ligand that has a particular bio-affinity for a particular receptor or interest. source

The rotational spectrum of isotopes bound to the macrocycles should result in peaks for both the Mo and Tc, (and the combination multiple of them on the one macrocycle) that can be interpreted to give the relative abundance of the two.