Week 9

I can’t believe I only have one week left! This summer has flown by. This week I stated characterizing my reactions on HPLC, which is an awesome instrument to use (I’m probably going to be called a nerd for saying this). Monday and Tuesday were spent developing the protocol for running reactions on HPLC. Running an experiment on HPLC pretty much starts off flying blind. There are multiple variables to adjust and you start off by guessing what the right numbers are. What solvent ratios to use, what flow rate, and how long do you scan for?  Answering these questions took me the better part of two days to answer.

After Tuesday I started collecting data on the reactions in various solutions. The good news is that I actually have good looking data for the first time this summer. However, the bad news is some of the solutions are causing noise on the spectra which makes integrating the peak difficult. I’ve started playing around with the variables again and as of Friday at 430 I believe I have figured out how to get NOM to go through the column and produce a clean signal. I’ll be testing this next week and hopefully get good data. I’m still having trouble getting a clean signal from xanthan, however this is not surprising since xanthan is primarily made from bacterial exoskeleton and contains a lot of organic and inorganic matter.

Off to the auto-sampler!