Dr. Tomas TRNKA
Professor of Organic chemistry
Prof. Tomas Trnka studied chemistry at Charles University of Prague where he received his diploma in 1966. In 1972 he obtained his Doctoral degree (CSc) under the supervision of Professor M. Černý 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 1997 he was appointed as an professor of Organic chemistry , from 1990 to 1997 he was 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, cyano groups. These sugars have been used also for the synthesis of selected oligosaccharides.
For separation of enantiomers of various aminoacids, aminoalcohol, aminosugars and other chiral amines we developed highly sensitive method based upon the derivatization of aminocompound with o-phthaldialdehyde and different 1-thiosugars as 1-thioglucose, thiogalactose and thiomannose.