05/30/2012
We had orientation today which at first seemed stressful and nerve racking but it turned out to be a great breakfast and good time. I really was surprised about the classes and how intense they were because I thought all we had to do was the poster. I'm not looking forward to it because I hate writing. I went to the lab and met my PI Dr. Balaji Sitharaman for the first time. This was after the adventure of finding the lab and meeting some of the grad students and surprisingly an undergrad that started research her freshman year. I was told to just take the safety training and be ready for tomorrow. I am a little nervous since I don't know what to read up on for preparation.
05/31/2012
I came into lab around 10 and began researching the lab's work including microbial fuel cells which I found most interesting and bone tissue engineering and scaffolding. After I met again with Dr. Sitharaman he told me to work with Tanuf, a rising undergraduate senior, for a week and then shadow the new grad student Stephen for a week. Tanuf works with MRI contrasting using graphene and magnesium instead of the toxic gadolinium. She does testing on rats and a lot of work on their blood, urine, and feces for toxicity. Today she was doing NMR samples using Spincore and the program T1IR-OIL. I helped with pipetting and separating heavy proteins from light proteins and the running UV-Vis for concentrations 0.1, 1, 10 each with three different sampes, I think exposed to mangenese. So I ended up using pipettes and cuvettes, the UV-Vis machine, deionized water, and dry air. Tanuf is very nice but I won't be able to keep working with her because she goes to the hospital to work on the rates. It's frustrating because I have no real project right now and no one to work under. Below is a picture of a UV-Vis machine.
06/01/2012
When Tanuf came in we started working on the oldest urine samples from the rats by transfering the four into one batch to an Erlenmeyer flask and the protocol calls for 5 times the amount of urine (36 mL) in 70% nitric acid but we only added about twice as much watching for a color change indicator that it was enough, and the color turned darker. This is special nitric acid that is purified of trace elements since this is what we will be evetually testing for. Tanuf continued the process of chemical digestions while I left for our Portfolio class.