Is earwax an organocatalyst?
by Chemjobber on Jun 05 2011 (8567 Views)The June 6th edition of Chemical and Engineering News has a funny little item in the Newscripts section (written this week by Steve Ritter) on a gentleman who believes his earwax could be a reagent:
Dylan's earwax TLC
Later on, as a zoology undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, [Charles V.] Johnson took a daring chance in a chemistry lab: He substituted earwax applied to a boiling chip for a palladium catalyst in an organic synthesis experiment. It worked well to make all-trans-stilbene, although his professor didn’t seem impressed.
That’s the thing that has bothered me most,” Johnson says. “My instructors didn’t think there was anything to it.”
After graduating, Johnson worked as a chemical technician at Sigma-Aldrich; he is now retired. He has toyed with a few other attempts to use earwax as a catalyst over the years.
For example, Johnson was at his dentist’s office last year and was inspired to try an experiment making a filling. He took methacrylate-based material commonly used in dentistry, added a touch of earwax, and it seemed to work well to polymerize the methacrylate. “It hardened right up,” he says.
Johnson has contemplated what the active catalyst might be in earwax, but he hasn’t been able to do an analysis to find out. Most likely it’s a protein or amino acid, he believes, or possibly a lipid. Organocatalysts typically are biomolecules such as the amino acid proline or a synthetic catalyst such as an imidazolidinone.
I suppose that I should note that I find Mr. Johnson's theory very odd and I'd like to see more data. Wikipedia indicates that keratin is indeed one of the constituents of earwax, so it is plausible that the keratin (or one of its constituent amino acids) is responsible for the putative catalytic activity.
All of this allows me to recall the work of Dylan Stiles and his sadly defunct blog "Tenderbutton." His classic (and celebrated) TLC of his earwax was one of the initial triumphs of the chemblogosphere. If one of the steroidal constituents of earwax turned out to be Mr. Johnson's catalyst, I foresee an excellent collaboration between Johnson and Stiles that could possibly lead to the world's first earwax-based oxidative industrial process.
I could make a fortune supplying this new industry.
Very interesting (and mildly gross)
The tenderbutton link is behind some login screen I can't get to. Will you describe what we're looking at in the TLC?
The login/password is tender/button.
Lane 1: Earwax
Lane 2: Lanosterol standard
Lane 3: Cholesterol standard
Lane 4: Squalene standard
[...] [1] login: tender; hasło: button [2] Może warto by zrobić na jakiejś pracowni z produktów naturalnych wydzielanie skwalenu z woskowiny? Chociaż jak sobie o tym pomyślę, to chyba nie chciałbym być prowadzącym na takich zajęciach [3] Przeczytajcie post na ten temat na Chemistry Blog. [...]