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Another week of instrument issues

 So, the good news is that the second compound (2,4-DNT) I tested in the hot water bath at the highest temperature did react. It took it most of the week to mostly be finished reacting, but it did react. This means that I'll be mostly focusing on trying to run this compound for my last few weeks. However, the results of those runs will be delayed until the new column arrives...

Yes, another week of inconsistent results and futile attempts to fix the HPLC means that we are replacing the ten-year-old column we were trying to use with a brand new one. Hopefully, this will fix a lot of the problems we were seeing, such as the varying retention times, and possibly make the data more consistent. However, this means that when it does arrive, I'll be running not only the old DNAN trials, to see if they get to be more consistent (I ran them all on Monday, and the data seemed worse, but that might just be the column), but also all the new DNT trials I'm starting next week. So that column had better be prepared to be running for most of the time while I'm here. As for those DNT trials, we decided to see if increasing the pH would help with the length of the runs (since I don't have 4 weeks to do some of those runs). We might also increase the temperatures we use, to see if that helps. But, I'm all set up to start some of those trial runs on Monday, and I hope they work out all right. I won't know how well they did until we get the column sometime next week (hopefully), but since I spent some time today making up the higher pH buffers, I'm hoping that they give us good results.

Lastly, today had four of the interns giving their final presentations, which was both good and bad. I liked getting to see their presentations, so that I could get some ideas of what to do for mine in a few weeks, but it was also sad to know that they were already done with their projects, and were going to leave over the weekend. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone, and that I'm going to be done fairly soon as well. However, I want to get at least some of those DNT runs finished before I go.