Graphs finished

We finally pieced together all of our data to show the inconsistency between results gained from HPLC Vs UV-Vis. Professor Sturgeon is currently working on his grant proposal and plans on studying our results as soon as he finishes making his last revisions. We are planning to make another visit to the University of Iowa in the next couple of weeks to get some ESR spectra from radical products of various peroxidase reactions.

In other news, payday was yesterday. This is especially nice because I've almost become broke with the various projects that I've started over the summer (I think around 5; note to self, finish one project, then begin another). I'll write about those near the end of the summer.

More Graphs

Well, I now get to conduct six more experiments in the next week to measure the degradation of Dichloroquinone (DCQ) with and without H2O2 at the three different pH levels of 6.2, 7.4, and 9.0.
However, thanks to Mike and Kyle, I now know how to set the UV-Vis for kinetics mode and I can tell it to take readings every 30 seconds for 4 hours. It ends up being a ton of data, but I can put it into excel and transpose it into tab delimited columns for Igor (a data compiler program we use) to read. This makes my life a heck of a lot easier and at the same time, I can compile more accurate/representative graphs.

Independence Day!

Brad is leaving this week to go down to Virginia and is leaving Blake and I here to do our research by ourselves. I thought it was a bit coincidental that just after the 4th of July weekend, during which we celebrated our freedom from British tyranny, that Blake and I are finaly going to be free from Brad's tyrannical rule.

All jokes aside, the next week is sure to be challenging; not having anyone to go to and say, "Ok, now what?".
I'm sure it'l be a learning experience for both Blake and I.

King George III has, however, already lined up three different experiments for me to do during the coming week. All of which need to be analyzed and compiled into graphs.

PS: Madison, WI was fun.

Post-Iowa

After getting back from Iowa last Thursday, we began to put together the data we collected from the ESR. Professor Sturgeon has asked me to come up with three more UV-vis spectra for three different pH levels by Friday; hopefully I don't screw up and they're good enough to be published in our paper. I'm able to understand a lot more about what the heck I'm doing compared to the first series of spectra that I collected so that's a somewhat comforting thought.
I just finished making all of the solutions for the reactions today and I will begin collecting the data tomorrow.

Week #3

I finally finished reading the research papers I found relating to microperoxidases and cytochrome c. To be completely honest, I couldn't understand half of the material in those papers; however, I did come to a general understanding as to their chemical functions. I was also able to get a lot of info about Microperoxidase-11 (MP11) when I emailed Corey White, a graduate of Monmouth a couple years ago and who now works at Sigma-Aldrich.
I learned how to use the UV-Vis this week and compile data using software such as "Gepasi" and "Igor"; very useful.
We're planning to go to Iowa to use their instrumentation next Wednesday; until then, we have to get ready and prepare our samples for testing.
Brad also got a new 10MP camera, so I expect he'll be taking pictures of the entire trip. To see them, go look on his blog.

Day 1

For our first day, we began by finishing our setup in our new lab. I wasn't expecting to have my own desk let alone my own PC to use so that was a pleasant surprise. After Brad showed us how to use our new lab notebooks, we began to check the calibration of the pipets that we would be using the rest of the summer to see how accurate they were. I had the one defective P5000, but luckily Professor Sturgeon found another functional one lying around. For lunch, Brad took us out to Chinese, which was on him (Thank you Brad), and when we got back, we went into the lab and he taught us how to make a phosphate buffer of pH 7.4 which surprisingly came pretty easily thanks to Analyt (Thank you Audra) from last semester. I also learned how to use the nanopurifier which dispenses super pure water used for chemistry. After work, professor Sturgeon then invited us to his house for dinner. So far, this summer looks to be pretty interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of it.