Skip to main content

Shelly Wu, Week 4-5

I spent the last two weeks conducting 3 batches of hot-water extractions and testing total organic carbon concentrations on my soil samples.
After spending almost two weeks consolidating my protocol, I officially began working on the soil samples from the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. Instead of 3 samples that I used in each of my practice trial, I have 12 samples per batch for 4 batches in total, which required much more time and attention. For my first and third batch of hot-water extractions, my data turned out well, and I could see some differences of TOC concentrations between surface and subsurface samples even though I only had half of the complete data. However, the same problem that happened in my practice trials occurred in my second batch—I got some negative numbers, which means that the TOC concentrations of certain samples are lower than that of distilled water. In order to fix this problem, Dr. Plante told me to rerun these samples after I finish all 4 batches to make sure that it’s only an extraction error. After testing TOC concentrations for my soil samples, I took the residues, dried them in an oven, and ground them for my next step, thermal analysis. I probably will not have enough time to conduct thermal analysis on all of my samples, but hopefully, I can do some of it, just to get an idea of what thermal analysis is like.

I have one more batch of hot-water extraction left, and I hope to see some more good results. Meanwhile, I am starting to analyze my data. I think the data analysis can give me more insight into the experiment as a whole.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...
3 comments
Read more