We tested and analyzed the samples I made yesterday. They still turned out random. So John and I decided that he made a few samples of his own so we could conclude if the problem was with my measurement or the stock solutions themselves. John made solutions with magnesium concentrations of 1mM and 2mM. We will test the results tomorrow.
After the conference we each have some new assignments. Mine – to test the ionic attachment of Magnesium to NCP. It’s simular to the last tasks, but a different method. Instead of adding Mg solutions of different concentrations to NCP, we are adding NCP to pre tested concentrations of Mg solutions, and testing the difference between the two. The goal is to get really careful and accurate data, so yesterday and today was spent working on the method. Yesterdays concentrations had a 6 sample standard divination of 1.4%, hopefully today’s samples will be even less.
We analyzed yesterdays result in detail and decided I needed to make some new buffer solutions. I took more time and did it more carefully so the results should be a lot better than yesterday. We will analyze the results tomorrow.
After a week long break, we all gathered together today to discuss. Professor Andresen gave us a little briefing of how the conference went and he proceeded to let us know about future experiments we were going to carry out. The first problem we wanted to correct was the ability to make solutions to a good accuracy. So , I made buffer solutions of different Mg concentrations. If the results do not turn out well, I will have to make some more tomorrow too because we are gunning for perfection with this.
Today was a short day for me with Ben and John away. I helped Professor Andresen sort out some articles for his conference. I also went through some of them as they had some relevance to what we are doing too.
Today, we got the results of the last test which turned out pretty well but with some unusual uncertainties. However, the got some good results on the concentrations at which the precipitation of the NCP occurs. I also helped Professor Andresen do some spins with some new NCP samples. The only difference with this samples was that the H3 and H4 tails were cut off from them. Professor Andresen was also preparing for his conference next week.
Today we looked at the latest results of the NCP experiment. These came out much better, and the concentrations were extremely consistent. They showed some interesting trends, mainly that there was a range where the Mg compensated for all the charge of the nucleosomes, but did not cause them to precipitate. Our main problem now is the large amount of uncertainty we are seeing. We will try to drive this uncertainty down with future tests.
Today we analyzed the data from the NCP experiment. The results are still very inconsistent, and are not showing any clear trends. They are showing some inconsistencies in all of the concentration values. Because of this, we prepared for another test this evening, which we can look at tomorrow.
The results we got from running the two buffers where a little inconclusive due to some issues with the magnesium concentrations in the buffer I made and some other complications with Ben’s buffer.But,we could still see the precipitation pattern of the NCP as the MG concentration increased. So Professor Andresen decided we needed to repeat the experiment to find out what as going wrong with it. However, this time, we spun the NCP eight times with the buffer because Professor Andresen suspected that the four spins we did for the last three experiments were not enough. We will analyze the results tomorrow and hopefully we get conclusive results this time.
Today we had a pretty big day. We ran two sets of NCP experiments, which involved running the machine well into the night. We are having some problems with inconsistent Mg concentrations, which we hope to solve with future trials. We will be analyzing the data tomorrow, as well as preparing future trials.
