September 24, 1998

Rocky Mount, NC -- The Fourth Monday Colloquium at North Carolina Wesleyan College features Dr. Deborah Glover-Fischer, Monday, September 28, at 11:30 a.m. in the Leon Russell Chapel. Dr. Glover-Fischer’s topic will be "Excited-State Enantiomer Interconversion Kinetics Probed by Time-Resolved Chiroptical Luminescence Spectroscopy, and the Solvent and Temperature Dependence of Enantiomer Interconversion Rates in Solution. The event is free to the public.

Dr. Glover-Fischer is a physical/theoretical chemist, not a synthetic chemist. She is interested in the "why" things happen. Her topic is basically looking at a molecule from a chemotherapeutic drug. The molecule has two mirror-image forms. Like a righ t and left hand, the mirror image forms can’t be superimposed; the two differ chemically and physically. In solution, if you can isolate one of the two forms, it will always convert to the other one. Her study is concerned with how fast it takes for one f orm to convert to the other, or the process of racemization. Then Glover-Fischer also looks at how that process is affected by temperature, and by the substance in which it is dissolved. The molecules are normally solids, but are dissolved in various liqu ids.

In particular, she looks at how certain chemotherapeutic agents interact with DNA. It’s not possible to look at what interacts with DNA, but you can look at what is left in the solution. A lot of chemotherapeutic drugs have right- and left-hand compone nts. The component that’s useless remains in the solution, and by process of elimination you can deduce what part of the molecule attaches to the DNA. Her study involves different types of applications, but the primary application is in the treatment of c ancer.

In her research, Glover-Fischer is trying to find out why the one-handed form attaches. "If we can understand the difference between the two, if you know the reason why, you should be able to do a better job at creating new chemotherapeutic drugs that would work more effectively," she said.

Her article about this research is soon to be published in the journal, "Inorganic Chemistry."

# # #