Havin’ some bebes

I had two, possibly three, babies yesterday.

I ran a photolysis experiment on the sulfamethoxazole with titanium dioxide for six hours and ran samples from various time points on the HPLC. The tentative results? Fifty-three percent degradation from a lamp we thought put out no UV light (and thus shouldn’t have been able to drive a reaction much at all). There were two definite products formed, although we haven’t identified them yet, and we may have to do a bit of tinkering to get good isolation of these since they’re very polar. These are my babies. The first comes off the column just before two minutes, and the second after the solvent front, around three and three-quarters minutes.

But the possible third? This is where things get fun. The sulfa drug steadily degrades for the first four hours of the photolysis, then, for the next two hours, there’s a steady increase in the peak area (which is theoretically proportional to the concentration) of our sulfa drug peak. It is distinctly possible there could be another compound eluting at the same time, but just not offset enough for us to identify shoulders or double-peaks. So I might have a hidden baby that wants to play peak-a-boo.

Of course, this was just a quick run-through to see if the lamp would even be useful in the TiO₂ experiements (which it is, since we’re getting degradation), so I’m making new, cleaner solutions to run it all again, as soon as we get water that isn’t green coming out of the tap. (We don’t want to kill our Milli-Q filtering system, so no tap water means no Milli-Q water.)

Yay Terre Haute water. Rich in all sorts of shit no one wants to drink.