Dr. Tomas TRNKA
Professor of Organic chemistry
Dr. Tomas Trnka studied chemistry at Charles University of Prague where he received his diploma in 1966. In 1972 he obtained his Doc.oral degree (CSc) under the supervision of Professor M. Cerny with a thesis about synthesis of sugar epoxides and their use in the synthesis. Later he taught at Faculty of Science of the Charles university, mainly organic synthesis and separation methods. In 1986-87 he enjoyed 6 months stay at Freie Universitat Berlin dealing with synthesis of aminosugars. In 1990 he was appointed as an assoc.professor of Organic chemistry and in 1990 he accepted his current position as a head of Department of Organic chemistry.
His current research activity covers synthesis of carbohydrates and enantioselective separation.
A growing appreciation of importance of carbohydrates has prompted the development of a new and high yielding synthesis of monosaccharide units which could be used for preparation of complex molecules. For a period of almost 20 years we devoted a big effort toward synthesis of different monosaccharides substituted with various substituents e.g. halogeno, amino, thio, cyno etc. groups. These sugars have been used also for the synthesis of selected oligosaccharides.
For separation of enantiomers of various aminoacids, aminoalcohol, aminosugars etc. we developed highly sensitive method based upon the derivatization of aminocompound with o-phthaldialdehyde and different 1-thiosugars as 1-thioglucose, galactose and mannose.