Gabe Wooden
Medical Laboratory Science Major
Physical and Biological Sciences Category
Bio
Hello, my name is Gabe Wooden! I am a senior at Missouri Southern State University majoring in medical laboratory science. After a year of clinical laboratory experience, I plan to pursue a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics to contribute to research in the field of synthetic biology. I will likely pursue a Ph.D. in Genetics to further my expertise in particular research interests.
Abstract
Malaria is a parasitic disease that continues to be an important public health concern for developing countries where transmission regularly occurs. Antimalarial drug resistance is one of the greatest challenges to malaria control that has arisen within the 21st century. Synthesizing new compounds that are not subject to said resistance is critical to solving this problem. The work presented here involves a one-step process to attach an imidazole head group to a quinoline ring. This work is a continuation of Jacqueline Ballay’s work on an honors project. Prior work to synthesize simplified versions of reversed chloroquine analogues involved several steps and included a modified version of a known pharmacophore, that helped reverse chloroquine resistance. This work involves nucleophilic aromatic substitution via a benzyne intermediate, which should help the process to be more efficient. Attaching a library of different head groups to the same imidazole ring will allow the deployment of many different synthesis reactions. IR was used to analyze the compounds and product purity was checked using TLC.