Science Concepts:  enzyme structure and function, intermolecular forces, chemical bonding, molecular geometry, spectrophotometry/fluorimetry, electrophoresis

Activities featured: determining inhibition of an enzyme, analyzing structure/activity relationships in molecules, design and computational modeling of candidate drugs

Chemistry Standard Course of Study Objectives addressed: 1.01-1.03, 2.01, 2.07, 4.01, 5.06.

            Drug development takes two basic forms: drug discovery and drug design.  The first part of this Field Study looks at a high-throughput screening process employed by Amphora Discovery Corporation as they develop a library of effective enzyme inhibitors.  The hope is that one of these inhibitors might effective block an enzyme necessary for a disease process, leading to a treatment.  Students perform a human-run version of Amphora’s automated test for inhibition and then analyze the data provided to determine which compounds were successful inhibitors.

            The second part of the day involves teasing out structure/activity relationships in the candidate structures tested earlier.  Once students have some basic ideas about what structures in the compounds might be making them effective inhibitors, students use MOPAC, a computational chemistry engine, to produce a model of a novel candidate structure and compare its predicted characteristics to the observed ones.

Student Profile

This unit is appropriate for students in Standard, Honors, or AP Chemistry.  The content is sufficiently flexible to accommodate students from entry-level to highly advanced.