I’ve spent the last week in the G-Mol Lab working on my summer project. The lab is great; brand new and with cutting edge analytical equipment.
So far I’ve spent the whole week preparing samples. Grinding up zooplankton, weighing them, extracting organic compounds (mostly lipids), evaporating the extract down, more weighing. It’s slow work, but I’m going faster now that I’ve got the method down. Next week I need to do the same for the last batch, and then we get to start dividing up the fractions, and running them through the GC-MS.
In the meantime, here are some pictures:
My Workspace in the Lab
My fume hood, work in progress samples and lab book. Also visible is one of the rotary evaporators.
Extracts
The extracts from the first 11 samples + blank (one of the samples isn’t shown) before drying them down to weigh the dry mass. The brilliant orange colours are an unusual sight in a geochemistry lab. The bright orange colours of samples 50 and 51 are from Calanus Hyperboreus.
It was a really good first week, I’ve learnt a lot and it has been pretty enjoyable. The next 6 weeks promise to be just as interesting, if not more so.
Tags: Biomarkers, Geology, Summer Project