Speaker
Description
To reveal the biological uptake of f-elements after an unintended release to the environment, a deeper understanding of their interaction with biomolecules is of great importance. Due to its hard Lewis basic character, the phosphoryl group is known to display a strong affinity towards certain metals. In the case of some biomimetic proteins, phosphoryl groups are present in the form of phosphoserine residues, and studies have shown that they display increased affinity for f-elements. For this reason, studying the interactions between phosphorylated amino acids and f-elements was envisioned to improve our fundamental understanding of the biological uptake of f-elements. Thus, phosphorylated amino acids were chosen as model compounds.
The phosphorylation of amino acids was achieved with the phosphorylation reagent (py)2PO2[OTf] (py = pyridine), a versatile PO2+ synthon capable of reacting with various nucleophiles. The model compounds were obtained by reacting this phosphorylation reagent with various protected amino acids. The coordination properties of these model compounds towards f-elements were investigated using La(III), Sm(III), and Lu(III) as early, middle, and late lanthanide representatives. The binding behaviour of these model compounds will be presented.