The pharmaceutical industry has a major impact on society and the job market for chemists. Students with enthusiasm for drug design, or occupational interests in pharmacy or medicine, need hands-on laboratory experience in medicinal chemistry. Our goal is to provide this experience through the implementation of a drug synthesis and assessment experiment into the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. To that end, we have developed a novel small molecule binding assay involving the displacement of ANS (anilinonaphthalene-1-sulfonic acid) from the heme-binding active site of AHb (apohemoglobin). We have also examined the binding affinity of several different drug scaffolds for the AHb active site. Our new laboratory experiment thus consists of undergraduate students synthesizing a small molecule, assessing the molecule’s binding affinity to AHb via the displacement assay, and then analyzing collective results. The experiment will be launched this semester in the undergraduate organic lab for majors. Assay development, drug scaffold syntheses and AHb binding data, and methods for implementing the experiment in the undergraduate lab will be presented.

Developing a drug displacement assay for the undergraduate laboratory

2019 Spring National Meeting

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