One of the newest members of the Pollock lab is Lucy Zhou. Officially she joined the lab in the spring semester, learning all about protein expression and purification as well as running our fluorescence polarization assay. Thank you to Courtney for training her so well. This summer, however, she is starting on a new direction for the MEMO project – synthesis of small molecule inhibitors! We are very excited to be moving in a med chem direction (very reminiscent of my postdoc days). She has already accomplished a lot and we are only in week 2 – she has cataloged some reagents, run a number of test coupling reactions, and now is working towards her main starting material for derivatization. The first step is hydrogenation. Although we do have a (very old) Parr hydrogenator in the department, it hasn’t been used since I’ve been here. Instead of dragging it out and hooking it up, we opted to test out the balloon method. Here is Lucy with her reaction that is currently running. Fingers crossed for a good reduction!
~jap
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