July 9th

Today, I spent pretty much all day making new samples to test. I was anticipating getting the new nitrogen tank today, which would let me run some of these samples, but it hasn't come yet. I have two new calibration standards, which are both designed to span the exact range I'll be working with. They are both the same thing, but prepared twice just to make sure that sample preparation doesn't have anything to do with the results. I also prepared these calibration standards to be tested for accuracy as well, by separating them into additional tubes. I also diluted the DNA samples into 4 different sets, each of which are 100X dilutions. Today, the professor gave me a paper that has possible applications to our project. The paper suggest that some of the Cohex did not completely dissociate in the original solution, making some of them +2 ions. This would help explain why our results are significantly higher than the existing PB theory would suggest.