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Einstein has come to live in our lab and is a nice distraction with all the sets of clothes he came with.

Back from break.  Just before we left, we found out that I added phosphorus to the samples and should not have because the nucleosomes already had them.  So this is what messed up our last run.  So today Brian and I remade the samples without the phosphorus.  After we spin them in the cold room tomorrow we will add the 1 ppm Co standard.  Then into the spectrometer on Wednesday!  Hopefully this run comes out perfect.

Here is a fun picture of our samples

After a week off, Lauren and I came in this afternoon to resume our experiments. We are planning on redoing our experiment from 2 weeks ago. Today we made samples with MgCl, NaCl and Trs. We did not include P. Adding P messed up our results last time. We are planning to spin the samples tomorrow and will run the samples on Wednesday in the spectrometer. To prepare for this, we also labeled and weighed tubes for tomorrow. We will keep the sample after Spin 7, Spin 8, and after we flip our filters.

This morning Brian and I made the diluted samples of the spin 7, spin 8, NCP, and Buffer.  Then we ran them in the spectrometer.  After lunch I analyzed the data.  Not really sure what I should conclude from it, but Andresen can help with that tomorrow morning.  Here are the graph’s I got, though.  Error bars are shown, but many of them are small enough that you can’t see them.  I do think it is a problem that we have such small counts in the magnesium, but the sodium seems fine.

This morning, Lauren and I finished diluting our samples from the spinning yesterday and ran them in the spectrometer. After lunch, she analyzed the data while I started on a new calibration set. We still have enough of the previous set for a few more runs. The percent errors on the new set are very low so hopefully it will be as good as the previous set.

This morning I looked a the data from the last test run.  It came out really well, all the concentrations were consistent with each other, percent errors were low.  So we decided to do the real run aka same experiment just adding nucleosomes.  So Brian and I made up new samples and spent the afternoon spinning them.  We decided to keep the calibration set from last time, because there is enough for a few more runs and as you could see from the picture, very correlated!  Not enough time to run the spectrometer today, but we’ll do that tomorrow and see how everything went.

This morning I read an article about DNA condensation while Lauren analyzed the data from yesterday. After discussing her findings with Prof. Andresen, we started making samples to run an actual experiment with. After lunch we went to the cold room to spin these samples. We spun 8 times, collecting the sample after spin 7, spin 8, and after we flipped the filter.

This morning I went to the cold room in the science center to spin samples. This took me up until lunch. After lunch, I finished making these samples to be run in the spectrometer. I collected the spin through liquid from spins 7 and 8. I also collected what was left in the tubes after all the spins. We will see the results of the samples tomorrow.

This picture deserves a post of it’s own.  Except for that one point, this is the most beautiful correlation I have ever made with the spectrometer.

Fairly calm day.  Went over the data this morning.  The Spin 7 and Buffer samples came back consistent with each other.  However the left over samples were incredibly high, way too high.  I’m pretty sure it’s because I messed up that part, when I flipped the filter for the spin I accidentally put it in the same tube, not a new one.  Also I forgot to do a spin 8….incidentally Brian and I spent the afternoon making new samples and calibrations.  We ran the calibrations to make sure there were ok, but it looks like we’ll have to re-do them tomorrow morning, since the magnesium and phosphorus correlation weren’t very good.  And tomorrow we are going to go to the cold room again and do the experiment right this time.  (And also bring a sweater ^_^)