June 30th

I finally have real, tangible, reasonable results from our collaborator's samples! I spent the morning making new calibration standards and a new set of test samples. I also started reading an article about questionably-plausible applications of this research in gene therapy. It also has applications in designing safer and more effective drugs, as well as learning how viruses pack DNA so efficiently, which would help us fight them. Anyway, the results look fairly consistent at least, I would say accurate but I'm not sure we know what they're supposed to look like. There may be one outlying point that I need to check into, it's possible that I messed up the preparation. The results seem to be telling me things, I'm just not sure what those things are yet. It is clear from the results that as you go up the series of increasing initial magnesium concentrations, the final results are that the magnesium out-competes the cohex. The unknown part is how and why this happens.