Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Synthetic chemists make new molecules every day, and the goals of synthetic chemists at UVic range from the generation of new cancer therapeutics, to the preparation of smart materials for medical diagnostics, to the synthesis of novel catalysts to drive energy efficient industrial chemical processes. All of these diverse goals require that the synthetic chemist and these require rapid analysis to determine their identity. Mass spectrometry is an indispensable technique for this purpose, because it is capable of very quickly (seconds) determining the mass and elemental composition (and thereby its identity) with high accuracy. That information allows the chemist to confirm that they've made the compound they intended to, and they can move on to the next step and/or publish the data as part of their evidence for that compound's identity and purity. The Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria has several such instruments, but the one responsible for analyzing non-polar molecules recently failed, leaving us entirely lacking a critical tool and creating a serious bottleneck in the workflow of half of the Department's research groups. A silver lining in this loss is the revolutionary advances that have occurred in mass spectrometric technology in the recent past. Today's machines are much smaller, more versatile and more powerful, and we have leveraged our contacts and our own track record in chemical synthesis to obtain a huge discount (>50%) on an instrument that will be the first of its kind in Canada. The requested funds will allow us to replace our critical infrastructure, while also allowing us to break open new areas previously restricted by the limitations of old technology.