14/02.2020
This week’s life and environment seminar didn’t sound at all appealing to me, but in the spirit of looking to expand my interests I attended it anyway.
This seminar was taught by Martina Lahmann who lectures at Bangor university.
Martina specialises in glycobiology, and this particular seminar focused on saponins.
Saponins (come from the old word for soap) are compounds found widely in nature and some even in our body.
Cholestane and Spirostane saponins have a sugar on one end, Furostane and Triperpenoide saponins have sugars on both ends.
They’re all sugar molecules surrounded by carbon rings. The ones with just a single sugar molecule are ones that act most like soaps.
Some industrial applications of saponins include:
– Steroid hormones
– Food additives
– Fire extinguishers
– Denatured alcohol
Some biological applications include:
– Fish and snail poisons
– Ion channel blockers
– Anti inflammatory medication
– Flavour modifying substances
Martina was the first person to synthesise dioscin, which is a saponin.
Martina then also looked at the Ivy plant that has a particular compound called hyderagenin that is highly active on liver flukes.
To extract this is very difficult.
The process involves drying and grinding the berries and extracting the oil out. From then, you do a crude ivy fruit extract, and this gives you some saponins to work with to get the hederagenin.
The hederagenin compound came out so clean that it started to crystalize.
After doing some work making compounds with the hederagenin, they came across a publication about Anemoclema glaucifolium which is an extraordinary plant. The sugar molecules are oval shaped rather than rings and it is the only example of this on the planet.
So Martina (and lots of students) made compounds where hederagenin would be combined with various C-glycosides.
Using all this knowledge, Martina then went on to synthesising Anemoclemoside A, which hadn’t been done before.
They then moved on to Anemoclemoside B, starting by looking at the old synthesis. This one was more in depth than the previous one.
Without getting to into the logistics of it, over 100 compounds have been prepared and all of these have been evaluated against liver flukes.
This lecture has really solidified the fact that biochemistry is of no interest to me.
It really doesn’t grasp my attention enough to understand the concepts behind it.
Life of El 