The College of Chemistry at the University of California has been transforming the generalchemistry curriculum for chemistry majors to teach students about using chemistry to meetsociety’s sustainability challenges. A main focus of the general chemistry curricular revision is toinvolve students in the authentic practice of chemistry in a structured context, moving fromguided-inquiry lab experiments to independent research projects. Sustainability and the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry are integrated explicitly and implicitly in the laboratory activities.Although it is an extremely important topic, environmental toxicology is not frequently taught inchemistry courses. An overview of our toxicology experiments throughout our curriculum willbe presented with a specific focus on a new two-week module that we have developed. Theexperiments are inspired by a recent paper in Green Chemistry (Voutchkova et. al., 2011) whichexamines physical properties that might serve as predictors of aquatic toxicity. In this work theauthors found a correlation between the HOMO-LUMO gap, octanol-water partition coefficient(logP) and aquatic toxicity. Our students study pesticides and fungicides commonly found inwastewater, atrazine and metalaxyl. They compute the HOMO-LUMO gap using WebMO and measure logP experimentally using UV spectroscopy. They also perform an algae toxicity assayto determine the half maximal effective concentration (EC50) of the compounds usingfluorescence spectroscopy. The students not only learn essential laboratory skills during thismodule, but also the basic fundamentals of toxicology.

Environmental toxicology experiments in the general chemistry laboratory curriculumat UC-Berkeley

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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