Chemistry – the Real Magic

Below are examples of some cool stuff organic chemistry has to offer. As inspired by an example of some other disciplines, this shall be known as Organic Chemistry Porn.

1) Colors, lights, action!

Organic compounds can be of every imaginable color, as well as some that are unimaginable. But the really cool part starts when they change color or glow vivdily.

• Weird changing colors

It's easy for a chemical compound to be colorful - it just needs to absorb some of the visible light that passes through or bounces off of it, which just calls for a few key features in the structure. Through strategic changes to the structure, it can easily change, lose, or gain color. Шt is common and used in many situations. A classic example are those pH indicators, which change color as a result of acid-base reaction. But this could be any other reaction. A weider case of changing colors is an oxymoron called Liquid crystals. In these, the color does not come from the molecules absorbing light. Instead, the molecules line up, kinda like in military formations. And, if the distance between the lines is right, they will selectively disrupt the light of matching wavelength, through the physics voodoo of diffraction and interference. These formations are somewhat flimsy, so a mere change of temperature or electric field will alter them, and their start weirdly changing colors like chameleons. That trick is used in mood rings. Oh, yeah, also in displays of laptops, older style flat screen TVs, and some other devices, hence the name Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD).

• Weird glowing colors

To make things glow is a bit harder - to do that, the compound needs to emit extra light rather than just absorb some. One cool and somewhat rare way is for a compound to pick up extra energy when it forms in a chemical reaction, and then spit it out as light. That is called by a fancy word "chemiluminescence". The most well known demo of that is oxidation of luminol, or "liquid light". Those glow sticks work this principle, too. So do fireflies, glowing algae, and other glowing sea creatures, though in this case it is called biolumenesce, since living organisms orchestrate the reaction. A more common way of glowing is a trick: a compound absorbs invisible light (usually UV light), absorbs and "digests" it, then spits the energy out as the light we can see - so it appears to glow. That is called Fluorescence. The demo of that you might see usually involved fluorescein - a dye that is redish-orrange by itself, but glows funky bright green under UV light, greatly resembling radioactive sluge. Shoelaces that appear to glow, shirts linings that glow under dance "black light" - all those are fluorescent dyes. As usual, living organisms harnessed that trick as well. The most notorious case is the green eggs and ham green fluorescent protein from jellyfish. Of course, scientist just had to make that one weird, transplanting the gene for this protein into all kinds of animals, even cats!

2) Life changing

Since all living things operate on organic chemistry, organic compounds have the power to hack life using them, in cool and sometimes scary ways. For instance:

• Signalling compounds

We mostly communicate by talking. Scratch that, by typing. As a result, we are only dimly aware of chemical compounds sent to us by other organims, usually through our vestigious senses of smell and taste. For most of the living world chemical compounds are the primary means of communication. For instance, you can attract a swarm of gypsy moth by opening a can of chemical known as "disparlure", which is in nature emitted by female moth interested in meeting some males. You can chase away bees by using their "alarm" compounds. Such compounds are referred to as "pheromones", in recognition that they act like hormones, but don't stay inside the body. Though insects are most well known for them, many other creatures use them too, from bacteria to animals. Some were found for humans, too, even though we seem to be a bit less obedient to their signals than insects.

• Super toxins

A big part of species communication is them trying to kill each other. The chemical way of doing that is, of course, toxins, poisons, venoms, and other wonderful things of that nature. And champions of toxicity are not snakes or spiders. As usual, it is microorganisms. The absolte record holder is Botulinum toxin, produced by a bacterium Clostridium botulinum, a teaspoon of which, if ever produced, can kill about 25 million people. From the perspective of organic chemistrty, though, way more interesting are the toxins that are produced by sea microorganisms, such as those responsible for scari looking Red Tides. Some of these, like Maitotoxin, Palytoxin, take the cake as some of the most complex natural organic compounds. Others, like Ciguatoxin, feature such odd symptoms as reversal of hot and cold sensations (touching ice will fee like burning, for instance), used to definitevely diagnose that specific poisoning.

3) Stranger than science finction

And some things in organic chemistry are just plain super weird, the real dark magic.

• Aquamouse

We breathe air, which is 21% oxygen. You may have heard that oxygen dissolves in water, and it does. To whopping 0.6% by volume at 20 oC. Which means that if you had to breath water, like the fish do, you'd have to breath water in and out 35 times faster than air. Since we can't manage that we tend to suffocate in water. However, some weird organic liquids can dissolve up to 66% oxygen by volume. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes feasible to drown in that liquid and not suffocate. Though don't try that at home. This is known as Liquid Breathing, and have been sucessfully tried on some animals, like mice. If you are old enough to have seen that sci-fi flick The Abyss, and remember that episode with a rat breathing in this liquid - that was real. Not the the rest of it, though.

• Sheep cyclops

This weird story started when sheep in Idaho began giving birth to deformed lambs, with only one eye. After a lot of local plant collecting and feeding them to mice, researchers finally tracked this curse down to a plant called corn lily. And in that plant, they narrowed it down a single compound, which was thus named "Cyclopamine", since it was an amine, and it was creating cyclops. To add to the weirdness, the effect of cyclopamine was tracked down to interference with the workings of the gene called "Sonic Hedgehog gene", which activates during the development of embryos and controls segmentation of the body - in this case preventing eye sockets from separating. It got its name because in fruit-flies, where it was first studied, messing with its operation results in fruit-flies growing up with spikes all over, looking kinda like a hedgehog. They found three of these genes, so they needed different subnames. One was called a "Desert Hedgehog", another "Indian Heddgeg", and the third, since the scientint naming it was an obvious video game nerd, a "Sonic Hedgehog".