Week eight- things dont go as planned...

So there I am, in the lab, going about the purification as I did the day before and the day before that... when all of the sudden, my pump stops working! It just doesn't work anymore. Crap. Me and a few other people in the lab look at it, but no one can really figure out what is wrong, it had literally been working fine 24 hours earlier! We try changing some of the tubing and switching in new solution to no avail.

Eventually it was decided that the mechanism that all of the tubing goes through must be clogged and therefore it needs to be cleaned. No one in the lab had ever taken it apart so I was handed a binder with instructions and a "good luck". It was trickey because the instrument had a bunch of little screws and pieces which were very easy to lose! We cleaned the pieces in an ultra sonicator which was a water bath that sent sonic waves throught eh water to shake anything loose from which you are cleaning.

After putting it all back together I flipped the switch and it worked! I felt very accomplished :)

Next week I will be reconstituing some PHM with Copper which is used for research in the lab as well