Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Shipman, Steven

Area of Concentration

Chemistry

Abstract

Nearly all pharmaceutical drugs come with side effects, including the anticonvulsant drug lamotrigine. In this thesis, several newly proposed alternatives to lamotrigine and their potential metabolites were studied as possible ways to mitigate lamotrigine’s side effects. Simulations were performed on these structures along with lamotrigine and a related molecule, elpetrigine, using the structure optimization software Gaussian and the docking software AutoDock. These molecules were docked to a sodium ion channel, which is thought to be the protein responsible for the therapeutic effect of lamotrigine. The docking simulations found that a fluorine-substituted lamotrigine had the strongest binding affinity to the sodium ion channel of the three newly-proposed structures, but lamotrigine itself had the strongest binding energy of all the molecules studied.

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