The Importance Of Spectroscopy

Mission statement: The importance of Spectroscopy

The Importance of Spectroscopy o Chemists can design specific synthetic routes to produce compounds from starting materials. o However, how do the chemists know what structures the chemicals that they are wishing to make have? o Chemists do know what structures chemicals have; it has probably been the most important development in organic chemistry in modern times that chemists are able to determine the structure of organic molecules. o Spectroscopy is responsible for this development. o There are three major types of spectroscopy used by organic chemists:

1. Mass spectroscopy- used to determine the mass of a molecule and its atomic composition.
2. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (N.M.R) spectroscopy- used to determine the different hydrogen environments present in the compound.
3. Infrared spectroscopy- used to work out the functional groups in a molecule. o Ultraviolet and Visible spectroscopy are also used, but not as commonly as the three above. The determination of an organic structure using spectroscopy o Imagine you had just discovered a useful unknown compound from the natural environment. How would you go about determining its structure? o The first step would be to calculate the molecular weight and atomic composition; this could be worked out using mass spectroscopy. o Infrared spectroscopy could then be used to determine the functional groups present in the compound. o The most powerful spectroscopic technique, n.m.r spectroscopy would then be useful. Applications of nanoparticles in biology and medicine

The fact that nanoparticles exist in the same size domain as proteins makes nanomaterials suitable for bio tagging or labelling. However, size is just one of many characteristics of nanoparticles that itself is rarely sufficient if one is to use nanoparticles as biological tags. To interact with biological targets, a biological or molecular coating or layer acting as a bioinorganic interface should be attached to the nanoparticle. Examples of biological coatings may include antibodies, biopolymers like collagen, or monolayers of small molecules that make the nanoparticles biocompatible. In addition, as optical detection techniques are wide spread in biological research, nanoparticles should either fluoresce or change their optical properties. A list of some of the applications of nanomaterials to biology or medicine is given below: o - Fluorescent biological labels o - Drug and gene delivery o - Bio detection of pathogens - Detection of proteins o - Probing of DNA structure o - Tissue engineering o - Tumor destruction via heating (hyperthermia) o - Separation and purification of biological molecules and cells o - MRI contrast enhancement o - Phagokinetic studies Reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC419715/