ORGN 676 |
| The goal of the project is to transform inanimate molecules into an organized system resembling living units through a bottom-up approach. In particular, the coupling of two man-made chemical systems, one mimicking metabolism and the other heredity, inside of a dividing chemical compartment is needed. Our strategy tests if growth and division of pre-assembled fatty acid based vesicle systems are possible when provided synthetic precursors. Precursor molecules are designed to undergo photochemically catalyzed conversion into protocellular building blocks via a metabolic mediated process using a ruthenium organo-metal complex as a cofactor. Specifically, we are attempting to reduce picolinium ester based lipid like precursors into fatty acids with [Ru(bpy)3]2+ sensitized electron transfer from a sequence dependent nucleic acid. Synthetic efforts towards our fatty acid based protocell will be described along with preliminary experimental results that include the first example of photocatalytic cleavage of a picolinium ester to generate a carboxylic acid. |
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Lipids, Nucleotides, and Mimetics
1:00 PM-4:40 PM, Wednesday, 13 September 2006 Moscone Center -- Room 131, Oral
Division of Organic Chemistry |