Week 5: Almost Done
We are almost done with the FTIR Lab. The only thing we need to do is have someone read through the lab and see if our procedure is simple and clear enough. That will happen on Wednesday. I read the owner’s manual for the next lab we are going to be working on. Since this lab is nearly done, we are going to work on another lab that involves pipetting. We will be using Whey protein and diluting it with micropipettes. Micropipettes are used to measure a precise amount of liquid from a solution. The micropipettes we are using have multiple ranges on them. Some have a range of 1-10 microliters and some have a range of 100-1000 microliters. There are also digital pipettes, but those are hard to use. We diluted our samples. This was tricky because I had to measure one microgram of the protein. It was a very small amount. What shocked me even more was trying to pipet microliters into a beaker as practice. I was not sure how small the pipettes could get, but when I got to 1 microliter, I was surprised when barely a drop of water came out. It was fun using the micropipettes. You do need to change out the tips every time you use one, so it does take a while. We had someone come in and try our FTIR Lab. It turned out well. The first computer we tried to use did not want to work, so we moved onto another one. She thought the lab was good, there was some changes I make to clarify how to make and file and how to find where the data will be to treat it. After I made some changes to the lab, we worked on continuing the pipetting lab. I had to dilute the samples even more so that the machine could read the absorbance. When we tested the machine, it was hard because it was new and we had to push multiple buttons to try and find out how to get it to work. When the data did show up, there was letters, but no numbers. Eventually we were able to get the data to show us the absorbance of the samples, but the numbers did seem to fluctuate. It could be because we diluted it too much or it could be the machine. We are going to test it next week to see if we can get a better read.
