Chemistry in Pictures: Column colors

Chromatography is a critical tool in chemical synthesis; it’s often the only practical way to separate what you want from a reaction mixture from what you don’t. Kathryn Wolfe’s synthetic workup wasn’t all that colorful till she illuminated her column with a UV flashlight. Wolfe is a PhD student at the University of Calgary. “I knew that my compound was the yellow spot, and a byproduct was the red spot,” an unknown impurity, she says. “The blue, I figure, is PPh₃ O, another byproduct of the reaction.” Wolfe ran the separation to purify tetrakis(butyl) 1H-phenanthro[1,10,9,8-cdefg]carbazole-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxylate, PTEN-H for short. She’s investigating that mouthful of a molecule as hole transport material in organic field effect transistors that could eventually be a part of printable electronic devices (Flex. Print. Electron. 2022, DOI: 10.1088/2058-8585/aca166) .

Submitted by Kathryn Wolfe

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