Life in the lab

...is quiet, save for the monotonous hum of the fume hoods and the cacophony of whirs, beeps, and chirps emitting from various precision lab instruments dutilfully fulfilling their jobs. Or, in some cases, rebelling against their human counterparts, almost gleefully it appears.

This week, I attempted to befriend the Varian ProStar, or the machine pictured below. After fighting it for days, my advsior managed to tame the beast into a obedient machine that I could use for a few days to prepare my flash chromatography samples.

After preparing GCMS SPM samples last week with a concentration of 5 g TOC SP / 500 uL, and diluting this with ethyl acetate to get 13 SPM samples with 100 mg of SPM TOC each, I was finally able to use the flash chromatography machine to "clean up" my samples. This means, that according to molecule polarities, I could sort the compounds in the suspended particulate matter samples into different vials by using different eluents with separate chemical properties. This will be useful in the coming weeks, when I want to analyze my samples for a somewhat narrow range of mutagenic compounds.

But before I get to the fun part, analysis, I am bound to a life dictated by the machines that I want to do my bidding. No, flash chromatography is only th beginning, my friends.

Perhaps even more tedious than running 13 samples with two fractions each through chromatography columns one-by-one is its following step of volume reduction. This multistep process sounds simple, but requires the utmost diligence. Twenty-four mL's of solution cannot be evaporated down to an exact 200 uL ( of 100 mg SPM TOC) in one go. It takes a lot of ethyl acetate, a lot of pipettes, and a lot of patience.

But at the end of the week, it's worth it, just to emerge out of the lab clutching the final vials of sample in its purest state... GC HRMS, here we come, watch out!