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Week 3: Running the HPLC

Rather than running the soil samples in the HPLC, I had to start by making stock solutions of 2-CAP, acetophenone (AP), and 2-CPE. This took a bit of time and Dimin was still making sure that the HPLC was working correctly. After I made the stock solutions I made standards of each that were 0, 25, 50, 75, 100, and 150 micromolar concentrations. I ran those through the HPLC to make a standard curve for each compound. Dimin and I started out gathering data with the HPLC set to a wavelenth of 247 nanometers. It went well for most of the week, and I got good retention times and good standard curves for 2-CAP and AP, but once I got to 2-CPE the peak areas that I was recording were really low. Too low. Dimin and I ran UV-Vis spectra for 2-CPE and 2-CAP and realized that 2-CPE adsorbs much better at a wavelength of 210 nm, so on Friday we switched to 210 nm and I started running the standards again. I only got through the 2-CAP standards and Dimin ran the AP and 2-CPE standards. 

Hopefully our results look a lot better this time, and we'll be able to show progress at group meeting on Monday. This blog post didn't end up being very long, but this week wasn't particularly eventful. I spent most of it running samples on the HPLC. Next week I think we'll be testing soil samples so that post will probably be more exciting. Until next week then!