Newswise — A chemistry experiment that has been off limits to college students for more than a century can now be performed safely thanks to a procedure developed at Indiana State University using a popular laundry product. The procedure, known as the Baeyer-Villiger Oxidation Reaction, has been essentially banned from undergraduate chemistry labs for most of its 105-year history.
But a trip to the grocery story by Indiana State chemistry Professor Richard Kjonaas has brought it back. While at the store, Kjonaas noticed that OxiClean contains sodium percarbonate, a substance researchers had earlier identified as an acceptable substitute for the chemical compound originally used in Baeyer-Villiger. He brought the OxiClean to his lab, where student Anthony Clemons of Detroit was looking for a research project. Kjonaas ran an initial experiment with OxiClean, and then assigned Clemons the task of conducting hundreds of tests to ensure the ingredient in the cleaning product worked reliably. "The key to the experiment was to run multiple trials with multiple reagent combinations and, once a certain method produced the desired result, to run more trials to make sure the results were consistent," said Clemons, who recently graduated with a bachelor's degree in life sciences and a minor in chemistry. "Like any other research scientists, we wanted to make sure the procedure produced results that were not by chance." The pharmaceutical industry uses the Baeyer-Villager reaction as one of the steps in making complicated organic molecules and it is an important procedure for students majoring in chemistry, life sciences and pre-medicine to learn, Kjonaas said. "Until now, they've been unable to do it in the organic chemistry lab until Anthony worked out this procedure with this household cleaner that amazingly does the job well," Kjonaas said. "It's not so amazing when you know that one of the ingredients is one that someone did find in 1991 would do the reaction. What is amazing is that no one picked up on it until now." The problem with the original compound used in Baeyer-Villiger, m-chloroperoxybenzoic acid, is that "it has the unfavorable habit of just detonating without warning," Kjonaas said. "Dr. Kjonaas has very cleverly developed a convenient way to bring to the undergraduate laboratory experience a reaction that has, until now, not been done in that context because of cost and safety issues, said Charles Garner, associate professor of chemistry at Baylor University and author of an organic chemistry laboratory textbook. "For many years, every organic chemistry student has learned this reaction on paper only. Now they can actually do the chemistry hands-on, which represents a much better learning experience," Garner said.
The chemistry department at Indiana State has developed several other undergraduate chemistry experiments, Kjonaas said, " but this one especially excites me because this brings for the first time this very important reaction into the undergraduate laboratory."
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