Week 6: Finally Done

Edie L -

Electron Scanning Microscope
Electron Scanning Microscope
Solution of protein stained with Coomassie Blue.
Solution of protein stained with Coomassie Blue.

I can not believe how fast this project has gone! It feels like I just started. We are nearly done with the protein lab, and I am finalizing the FTIR Lab. I will say the protein lab is my favorite lab I have done. It is fun using the micropipettes. I did a repeat of the lab I did on Friday with a few differences. Last week I diluted the solution in two tubes and then put it in the wells. This time I make an undiluted solution, and a diluted solution. We also found out that the wells can only hold 400 microliters of solution. So this time, I put 200 uL of the solution into five different wells. In the first well, there was just 200 uL of water. The second well had 25 uL of solution and 175 uL of water. the third had 50 uL of solution and 150 uL of water. The fourth has 100 uL of solution and 100 uL of water. The last solution had 200 uL of the solution. We the put 200 uL of Coomassie Blue which is used to stain proteins. This completely filled up the wells which was a problem for me because I had to do the same thing again so I could dilute it. I ended up doing the same thing over again in another row and taking half of the solution I made to put elsewhere. When the second solution was split up, I filled one of them up with 200 uL of water. This resulted in two completely filled up wells (one diluted the other undiluted) and one undiluted row that was halfway filled. When we measured them, I found something interesting. When we made the graphs for each row, we were looking for an upward trend with a R2 close to 1. For the wells which rows were both completely full we got an R2 of around 0.7. For the undiluted it was 0.7479, and the diluted was 0.7814. Close to one, but this is where it gets interesting. As I had mentioned previously, I made a second solution where I could split it in half to dilute it. I expected this to have a similar result, but the R2 was 0.9603. This was the best result we got from all the samples we tested. We think this is because it was halfway full. So we ran another test. This time it got a better result (0.87). So we put our procedure down, and the lab is ready to go. The students are going to try the lab next week. I will also be there to answer any questions they have. Since we are done with both lab, I am going to be looking up Superfund sites in Arizona. A superfund site is a place with hazardous waste polluting it. there are nine sites in Arizona and one in Yavapai County. I will look more into it on Monday, but I think it will be interesting. I also got to see a scanning electron microscope. That was fun to see.

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Comments:

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    madeline_s
    Hi Edie! All of the lab equipment is so cool!! How do Superfund sites connect to your experience working in the lab? Were there any substances in your lab that would be considered hazardous waste if not disposed of properly?
    zoey_c
    Hi Edie! I'm loving hearing the progress of your labs! Have any problems come up from using the equipment in your labs, or has it been pretty easy using the new equipment?
    payton_b
    Hi Edie! This is super interesting! Is it hard working with amounts this small?
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