the absolut best and würtz of orgo lab™: a collection

April 30, 2025

the absolut best and würtz of orgo lab™: a collection

hi everyone, it's finally 18th may and I'm finally done with all of my finals. as I promised, here is the best and würtz (worst) of orgo lab and some footage from dr maui's (melvin's) lab. I'll be adding more photos after I finish my walter whyte/lilli schwenk/nile red summer at bryn mawr. this blog is meant to be accessible to my non chem friends as well so I'll be using very basic terms. no 10 dollars words, I promise. in this blog, I'll be walking you through the almost chronological timeline of a lab semester as well as grouping similar stuff under the same title. well, allons-y!

go to 6. crystallization to see my crystals!

featuring protein crystals in dr kung's lab by jude <3

image courtesy of jude

how they look like on a multiwell plate. what you see above is the extreme close up of a droplet in a well. in each well, there're about 3~4 droplets.

protein crystals grown on the us space shuttle or russian space station, mir. you can find it on the wikipedia page for protein crystallization. I love this photo so much that it used to be my iphone background for a long time.

you be walking out of a 4.5hrs (or more) orgo lab with lab hickeys on your face

it's not every day that you see yourself in lab. my insta username is colette (as in ratatouille) toluene (the chemical compound.)

forbidden lab tea that francl's won't touch. I think it's 5x the concentration or normal tea.

1. lab check in/out/cleanup

the first and last thing you do in lab is making sure you have enough things in your drawer: get what you lack and get rid of what you're in excess. there's something about reagent bottles being stack neatly that awakened and triggered within me a very primal yearning to become walter whyte in breaking bad. I have to resist the temptation to test things out when I see them. if you're in a prof's lab, you even get the premium verison, or mega lab clean up, where you use so much acetone for the hoods and the benches that the lab smells like a nail salon owned by a first gen vietnamese immigrant family afterwards.

drawer 12d at the start of orgo 1

and at the end of it

drawer 12a at the start of orgo 2

and at the end of it

another place that gives the same vibe is cvs or rite aid pharmacy. there's just something so good about being among medicines. it's truly like a library but for the actual body. maybe I was meant to work for a big pharma company all along.

I see cancer and irreversible dna damage <3

shoutout to dr goldsmith's lab!

my favorite apparatus from the genchem lab is the erlenmeyer flask. however, as we advanced to orgo, it changed to a roundbottom flask, or a rbf as jim usually writes in his notes. these days I mix up between roundbottom flasks and resting bitch faces when I see rbf in the wild.

2. lab notebook

aka where the magic happens. charli was my ta for orgo 1, and everytime I pick up my lab notebook I'd always see stickers that they left. I loved them so much I collected all of my lab notebooks for orgo 1. photo credits to my younger sister lois for the lab notebooks.

the nature of lab notebooks is carbon copy paper, where you write on a piece of paper and it makes a copy on the one behind it. I struggled with lab notebook a lot at first, where I'd rip off whole pages when I make a little mistake. I switched to drafting it on scratch paper first, then copying it to the notebook afterwards, which still took me a ton of time as I over record things. dr k, upon seeing me on the first day of lab, joked about how I'm writing about the story of my life in my lab notebook. I learned the effective way later, where you take photos of how much things weigh and their appearance, then chronologically wrote them down in the notebook. however, that felt like cheating lmao. if you're still insecure, having a correction fluid pen may help.

I decorated my notebook for the melvin's lab a little too hard so it looks like those enchanted books from minecraft. this is also where I learned about the witchcraft called sparkly metal sharpies. they make everything better and you can write on black gloves.

3. TLC

aka my least favorite technique that we learned on the first day of lab. everytime we do this, I'm thank life that I'm not in dr mal's lab, where they do a lot of this to monitor reaction's progress. TLC stands for thin-layer chromatography. think about this as your ink chromatography but fancier. tbh, the process reminds me of performing asian acupuncture to a piece of paper, where you stab it with toxic stuff dissolved in dcm and ethyl acetate.

accompanying TLC is UV light, p-anisaldehyde stain, and the heat gun. after that, you get a bunch of spots that you have to record and calculate its Rf values. TLC for column chromatography is the worst, where you have 69 test tubes and you have to test every single one of it to see what's in each. I learned how to use the autocolumn before the manual column, and needless to say, that spoiled me, as with the autocolumn it does everything for you. it even tells you what fraction is in what.

TLC starter pack with TLC plates, vials with testing solutions, pasteur pipettes, and TLC spotting capillary tubes. to set up an eluting chamber, you would need another beaker with the solvent and filter paper. a pencil and ruler would also be needed to mark the spots seen under UV light.

4. mLLE (mmm, liquid-liquid extraction)

if you didn't get that brainrot french joke, mlle = mademoiselle, or young lady. and yeah it has nothing to do with french. this is my favorite separation technique given how aesthetic it is: it looks like you're staring at a lava lamp the whole time. this shiti gets less fun when the 2 layers have the same color, and you accidentally collected the wrong layer (never rotovap the aqueous layer). heaven knows how much dcm I added. another fun fact, the acronyms for dcm (dichloromethane) in vietnamese is actually a curse word: it's short for địt mẹ mày, or fuck your mom. it's the vietnamese equivalent of ntm or nique ta mère in french.

the organic layer contains dcm, which has a molar mass of 85g/mol, much much heavier than water (18g/mol), so it usually is the lower layer (though it's always safe to check with your lab prof/ta in advance).

forbidden canola oil

when you're placing the tiny 25ml erlenmeyer flask in the ice bath, CLAMP YOUR FLASK. I tipped over one while removing it and lost a shit ton of product to the cold water. my yield was halved, so did my heart </3

the many ways to say ice. my countribution was đá in vietnamese

5. rotovapping

also known as the last step before crystallization and after liquid-liquid extraction or column chromatography. this step employs my favorite apparatus, the roundbottom flask. rotovapping is short for rotary evaporating.

the moment before it turns clear

less fun if the rbf got stuck into the bump trap TWICE. I had to toss the product as a result.

sometimes you have so little products that it got stuck to the rbf walls. you're not even going to get to use any of it, it'll all be used for nmr to see if you actually have product or not.

sometimes it's even less obvious. the product in this photo is the faint ring around the rbf walls.

or little beads in the vial. surprisingly it still showed up in nmr signals.

according to jim we still have product

ever wondered what a virgin rotovap machine looks like? it looks like this: clear glass instead of the murky glass you usually see in lab. I saw it in dr goldsmith's lab while talking to tiff.

6. crystallization

aka how you get more pure product. you start by adding hot ethanol/water mixture into the crude product to dissolve all of them, then let it cool down. this is easily one of my favorite techniques in organic chemistry lab as it forms very beautiful patterns when products crystallize and arrange itself. I don't know how they do that unconsciously. this chemistry is organic, but not yet biotic. like quickly, quickly's getsomerest/sleepwell, I don't know how the universe shines the stars, constellate the constellations, and galactify the galaxys, but that doens't mean to say that you aren't doing it in just the same way as your breathing without know how you breathe.

yet, my favorite crystal is not found in the organic lab but in the genchem lab, if I remember correctly. copper crystals, especially copper (II) sulfate, remains my all time favorite thanks to its rich lapis lazuli color.

after you've got then crystals, the next step is to collect them through vaccum filtration. setting this shit up is my leas favorite as the tubes never fit on the first try and I always have ot make a few trips and forth between the hood and the reservoir to find the right size for the tubes. they're also either too short or long, so it bends and refuses to hold on normally when you set it up. this was my best set up so far.

if I remember correctly this shit is our (very pure) diy acetanlide

more proud footage of my vacuum filtration highway

you have not seen a more perfect fit, have you?

j'adore caffeine <3 until I have to scrape this shit out of the rbf with a spatula

was about to take a photo of this before scraping it but dr k walked by and I didn't want to look like a freak </3

after we obtain the pure crystals in vial, we test its purity by measuring its melting point and comparing it to the standard. if a compound is impure, it melts a lower temperature and stops melting at a higher temperature than the standard. its melting range is also broader.

this is one of the biggest inside jokes (or at least I made it) of the orgo lab. similar to the photos of the hot air balloon and the house in the autorefractor for people getting new pairs of glasses, if you don't know what this photo is, you haven't know suffering.

7. nmr salon

other than measuring melting point, another way to determine its purity is by analyzing its nmr spectroscopy, and someitmes this way is more reliable than melting points alone. nmr spectroscopy stands for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. think about mri but instead of getting photo scans for a human body, you get spectroscopy for a molecule instead. the word spectroscopy is made up of the latin word spectra (ghost) and skopia (to see). together, it's the art of seeing the ghost, the traces of the molecules that once were.

to make an nmr sample, you would take a little piece of your product/crystal, then add it into a 1 or 2 dram vial, then add around 700ml of chloroform (cdcl3), then transfer it to the nmr tube with a pasteur pipette or a micropipette. there're many ways to mess up this step. once, I added too much solvent (imagine the nmr tube filled all the way up), so we barely saw any signals for product and one giant peak at 7.26ppm. the other time, I was poking the nmr tube through the piece of paper, but I held it too far from its bottom tip, and it broke as a result. the other time, I submitted it wrongly to the nmr machine, or forgot to prioritize it before the batch of orgo lab nmr samples, so we had to way another day for our spectroscopy.

apparently, my friend has a worse case with micropipettes in bio lab, where she forgot to insert the tip and therefore stabbed it straight into a solution of e. coli instead. as a result, they had to take it apart to clean its interior. needless to say, she felt terrible about what happened.

as the work we do in dr melvin's lab contains fluorine, we can test whether a reaction is finished by checking its fluorine nmr (hydrogen/proton nmr is the most common one) instead of running a shit ton of tlc plates as in dr malachowski's lab. I asked dr hall about this, and she explained to me that dr mal's lab don't have a marker like fluorine, and proton nmrs are often busier, so it's harder to determine from nmr, which explains why they have to rely on tlc (thin layer chromatography) plates.

after cryo-electron microscope (cryo-em), the nmr machine is the second most expensive piece of equipment you can get in chemistry. the former can range from 3 to 7 million dollars, and the latter can range from 2 to 5 million dollars, but that only applies to 900Hz+ nmr machines. the one we usually use in orgo lab is 400MHz, which typically costs around $600k. as you climb up the Hz ladder, it costs more: $800k for 600MHz, $5 million for 900MHz, or $17.8 million for 1.2GHz. walking into park 175 has never felt more expensive.

a 700MHz bruker nmr machine (without auto loading lmao)

this is a brainrot diagram to show you how expensive the most pricey pieces of equipment in chemistry and physics are in terms of the net worth of world's richest people.
honestly, it should be illegal to be this rich.

I wonder if this can pass as the most expensive room in the entire bmc campus

back when i still spelled my lab partner's last name wrong (I'm so sorry stella). it's yang not wang.

no gloves in the nmr or ice room! you could get the keyboard or ice contaminated

the most honored note I've ever received

how not to break dr hall's heart

ok dr mal. fun fact dr hall was bmc class of 2012!

8. SIF synthesis!

here are some of the steps we go through while synthesizing SIFs (sulfone iminium fluorides) from thiophenol in dr melvin's lab. the bitchiest step is step 3, which usually drives jim nuts. step 1 is the stinkiest of all.

I failed at step one. I got a black solution instead of a bright orange fanta solution as jim got

waiting an extra week doesn't make it look less wrong as it's still not clear

after this step, we got stuck on step 3 for a solid month. then jim, our lab hero, somehow circumvented it and we finally arrived at SIF. its a very sticky solution with the same consistency as duck sauce with a soy sauce color. the worst thing about using SIF is that no matter how hard you tried to synthesize it, I bet more than what you use will stick to pasteur pipette tips and vials.

9. and 5pm walks back from park

aka the most rewarding part after a long lab. it's also during this walk back that I came up the idea of spring in a vial, a personal project where I pick flowers and place them in a vials to offer them to athena and seniors that I know. it was a hit and everyone loved it. I also love looking at the field during my walk back from lab. it's unwinding in nature and helps me decompress after a long session of lab.