Vy Duong's blog

I spent this last week of my CMOP internship mostly working on my final presentation. I ran some samples on the HPLC as well and once those were finished I compiled all of my data into nice graphs and tables. Final presentations were on Thursday and all of the interns did really well. Thankfully my presentation went without a hitch as well. I tend to speak a little too quickly when I'm nervous and presenting, but at least I stayed within the 10 minute time limit. 

On Monday I took more samples of the Leap tank sediments for both 2-CAP and TNT. I then spent the rest of the day running Leap tank samples on the HPLC. The HPLC was actually behaving quite well on Monday. 

On Monday I ran the 98 hour samples from the leap tank sediments on the HPLC and prepped the TNT samples for Hayley to analyze. I also made a new 2-CAP stock solution since I was running out of the one I made earlier. This new stock is much more concentrated, about 5 times more, so it should last a bit longer. Dr. Tratnyek received some graphene samples from a professor at PSU that are supposed to be excellent catalysts, so I prepped for the 2-CAP and TNT tests we would run on them.

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.

I completely forgot about this week's blog entry! I can't believe it's already Tuesday and I'm just now writing Week 6's blog. My apologies for the belated update. 

I started out the week running samples on the HPLC from the T=0 (where T is time) sediment sample that I'd prepped last week. I ran samples all of Monday.

One of th other interns, Jean-Paul, came back to the lab with sediment samples from nearby, so we began this week by running tests on his samples. I spiked two samples of the sediment with 2-CAP to see how it would react with this particular sediment type. For each sample, I would spike with 2-CAP, shake the tube for about a minute, withdraw about 1.5 mL to fill a microfuge tube, centrifuge the sample, then withdraw the supernatant to run on the HPLC. Dimin said that we should also filter the samples to make sure that nothing clogs the HPLC.

I was only in the lab on Monday and Tuesday of this week because I was on vacation Wednesday through Sunday. 

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.

I started setting up experiments this week and it was quite the experience. The background on this project that Dimin (my Ph.D student mentor) and I are working on is that an air base nearby is looking for the best method of remediation for the contaminated soil at the base. They sent several bags of samples of different kinds of contaminated soil. For this experiment I had to fill 16 glass bottles with 200 grams of one soil sample each and another 16 bottles with 200 grams of a different soil sample.

For the first week of my internship I read a lot of articles from the environmental/chemistry/biochemistry literature to find out what I could about electron transport systems (ETS). It was an interesting experience, trying to piece together this picture of what an electron transport system is and how it relates to possible fields of research. After a week of researching I presented what I'd found to Dr. Tratnyek and the other students/interns on his team. Hopefully Dr.