Tyler Wilson

Enzymatic Oxidation of Triclosan

Triclosan is used in many products that range from soaps to toys to mouthwashes because of its antimicrobial properties. Triclosan is believed to have a radical intermediate that allows triclosan to react and form different products. Different products that are formed through radical reactions could be hazardous materials.1 Our research will detect the radical in triclosan and analyze the different products that are formed to characterize if they are hazardous. This will be done by performing trials of triclosan products through HPLC to distinguish and determine the products, followed by NMR and flash chromatography to characterize the samples.

Research Daily Summaries

February 11th, 2016

Changed the solvent delayed time on the GC-MS to 3 minutes in an attempt to lower the scale of parts detected. This was done because otherwise the hexane in the solution was being detected to extremely and was not allowing the detection of any other particles. After the time correction, samples were loaded and run on the GC-MS for the 10 minute time frame. 6 different runs were saved on the GC-MS in an attempt to detect a standard. Since the standard solution was stored in multiple vials for safer storage, each of the vials was also tested in those 6 runs. Even after all the vials were run, there was still no detection of the standard in the GC-MS. There was also attempts to increase the injection size of the sample in hope of standard detection. Those trials were not saved because larger injections caused the GC-MS to detect too many ion particles of the hexane. Other runs were used to make sure all the sample was run off of the column after that.

February 16th 2016

Made sure to update wiki page and the page now includes this handy summary area. Went back and tried adjusting the solvent detection delay time for some more trials. The time was changed to 4 minutes and to reduce the hexane detection. Even after changing the delay time again, there was still no detection of the Triclosan standard on the GC-MS.

February 19th 2016

Came with ideas for photochemical reactions to recreate what was done in papers that were referenced. Turned out to be a misunderstanding and means I need to think of ideas for electrochemical reactions to acquire data for the poster and the conference. Heard that the solvents in the HPLC were changed from acetonitrile to methanol. To accommodate this new change, standards of the TC (Triclosan) were run on the HPLC using the same method developed last semester. This new method still worked correctly, because a single large peak of sample was still detected. There was one major difference in the runs when comparing solvents. The difference was that the TC eluded off of the column later in the method than what was seen with the acetonitrile runs. The difference was from 5 minutes with the acetonitrile to 10 minutes using the methanol. The data is currently posted on the poster board next to my poster.