Lab Rats' Sanctum

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Hello, Faye. What's your poison?
Mine is organic chemistry (mechanisms and synthesis).

 

Immunobiology, currently working on a project related to allergies.

 

Sounds fun.

My current project deals with the application of ring closing metathesis to some alkaloid synthesis, but I'm hoping my mentor will transfer me to an allen project that recently started.

Welcome to the Sanctum, Tarrasque. From which science do you hail?

 

Analytical chemistry, so Mass Spec and chromatography. Final year project was on rapid analysis of sugars.

 

Nice. GCMS can be a life saver. (and I secretly worship the NMR machine )

 

And a geneticist bolsters the ranks of Lab Rats. Welcome, Ziad.

 

Thank you, I'm honoured to be here!

Being the only microbiologist in a lab (well, the entire floor really) full of structural biochemists is weird. Well, half are chemists pretending to be biologist and the other is informaticians pretending to be biologists, so it feels even stranger. I'm surrounded with LC and X-ray machines!

 

I'm on the institute of organic chemistry, but my faculty is Pharmacy, so most people are pharmacists, or interdisciplinary.
After sitting through five hours of "swimming mice on diazepam and blueberry seed extracts", I feel like banging my head on the table.
Then I smell the ether, turn on the ancient vacuum evaporator (which, incidently, sounds like a Klingon Bird of Prey on coal), and the world is nice again.

 

If you want something much stronger than ether, try phenol. Now there's a trip you'll never forget!
On second thought - don't!
I know how you feel. Sitting through a whole-day symposium on electron density maps and beta barrels tends to drive me crazy. Then again I work with a deep-sea organism, so I'm technically affiliated with a bunch of physicists who spend all day talking about perovskites and tend to have fun by trying to apply enough pressure to oxygen to turn it into a solid crystal. Fun stuff all around!

 

Phenol is not bad, actually.
Try stale, watered DMF - it smells like a hot kennel.
Or, even better try 2-bromobenzyl bromide. A lacrimator to cry for
Allyl bromide, a.k.a. Stinky gets nice after a while.
o-I-phenol has a scent to remember too. For weeks.
I'll stop now. I smell something burning.
P.S. One of the professors here claims that double bonds smell like banana peals. The odd thing is... he is rarely wrong when smelling them.

 

If you're wanting to smell solvents then methyl tert-butyl ether (TBME) has to be the best. Fruity and sweet smelling.
Classic one though has to be ammonia. BE VERY CAREFUL! I once made the mistake of smelling an ammonia solution before I realised what it was. My nose burnt for the rest of the day.

 

My favourites would be the classics: ether and ethyl acetate. Halogenated ones are too sweet (like CH2Cl2 or chloroform).
Esters and ethers are nice, in general. Except for some vile liquid that we got as our last petrol ether shipment. The scent is... not right.
As for ammonia, I had this huge chromatography column where the eluent was ether saturated with ammonia... Making gallons of the stuff is not something I want to repeat. Ever.

 

Not a great fan of chloroform (though it does go very well with phenol). Esters are usually very pleasant, I remember quite a few that smell like "banana peels" as you put it, and we had to synthesise one in my undergraduate organic chemistry course. The lab smelled quite nice when we were done
Ammonia is NOT pleasant. One of the stains we use on lipopolysaccharide gels has ammonium hydroxyde in it. That stuff is awful.
Anything with bromide tends to not be very good for your health. It either stinks, will give you cancer, or both.
Speaking of gels, TEMED is a good favourite of mine. Not as bad as others, but it distinctly smells of rotten fish. Not something you want to use as cologne
How could I forget beta-mercapto-ethanol! Even in tiny amounts it still stinks. We had a mercapto-ethanol spill in my building last year - the whole building had to be evacuated for the rest of the day!

 

Mercapto really stinks, I second that. But we really shouldn't be going around sniffing these solvents to begin with (although my liver is probably gone with the amount of isoflurane I'm taking in).

 

Well, it's not like we are sniffing them on purpose (some of them, at least ).
Being in a lab de facto makes you a walking liver enzymes activity test subject ( because all the real rats in the vicinity either have six legs or have grown wings and moved to a healthier climate). The bugs are still there, from time to time. All the curious breeds have died out, true, but the ones left will soon be puting on white coats themselves.

 

Chalk up another Microbiologist/Geneticist! Although, going for Immunology, far more interesting

 

The other fields always looks more interesting... until you get into it.

 

Faye, we all know we shouldn't smell them, but it can be pretty hard not to sometimes no matter how hard you try. Mercapto's stench in particular sticks to everything so easily. Phenol:Chloroform isn't much better.
Dalveen, you traitor to the cause! Though I admit immunology is good fun as well.

 

We have to smell them - solvents have an annoying habit of washing off the labels on the beakers. How else are we to identify them?!

 

Yay for Dalveen! (whatever field he picks)