Week 7: Here's to Hoping for Continued HPLC Success

This blog entry is late again because I came down with a stomach flu on Friday. Unfortunately I was bedridden all weekend and forgot to update my blog.

Monday of week 7 I finished analyzing the temperature samples that I talked about last week on the HPLC. On Tuesday I ran standards of 2-CAP, AP, and 2-CPE on the HPLC to get new calibration curves, since the ones I made at the beginning of the year were at different HPLC settings. I then used the peak areas that I got to plot a graph of concentration versus peak area for each of the compounds. This lets me know about what concentration of 2-CAP, AP, or 2-CPE are in sediment samples based on their peak areas. 

On Wednesday I got a bit of a break from running the HPLC since Dimin had sediment samples from the leap (?) tanks that he said we should analyze. I'm not entirely sure what a leap tank is or if I'm even spelling that correctly, that's just what it sounds like he's saying. There were three different sediment samples from three different depths in the tank: 66 inches, 74 inches, and 78 inches. For the 2-CAP tests I put about 10 grams of each sediment into a falcon tube, and had three sets of tubes per depth: one for time zero, one to be stored at -80 degrees celcius for a week, and another to be stored at 25 degrees celcius for a week. I also filled another 9 falcon tubes with sediment to spike with TNT. I also made a carbonate buffer on Wednesday to put into the sediment samples on Thursday.

On Thursday I spiked the time zero sediment samples. One set I spiked with 2-CAP then analyzed with the HPLC, and another set I spiked with TNT then gave it to Hayley to analyze with her HPLC autosampler. I took T=0 hours and T=2 hours samples for each compound. I ran the 2-CAP samples on the HPLC for T=0 and T=2 hours. For the T=2 hours samples the HPLC had a skewed baseline but that seemed to fix itself by the next sample. The pressure went up a bit too but since the peak areas seemed to be okay I finished up the T=2 hours samples. By the end of my sampling the peak shape for 2-CAP was looking a bit off, but hopefully that's fixed itself by now.

Friday was the day of the Bonneville Dam trip with all the interns but by Thursday evening I wasn't feeling too great, and by Friday morning I was positive that I was sick. So unfortunately I wasn't able to go with everyone, but I'm sure they had fun.