Week 7 - Day 1

Today we got the NCPs ready to run in the spectrometer. Last week friday, we had a series of buffers with different concentrations of Mg in it for the eight different samples of NCP we were going to work on.First we spun down the NCP we had in a centrifuge three times in a buffer that contained MgCl. We then collected the NCP from the filter and tested the pH of the NCP to see if the buffer was effective and indeed it was because the concentration remained at 7.0. We diluted our eight magnesium samples, NCP, and and the buffer we used in the third spin by a dilution factor of 60. Then put them in the spectrometer so we could test the amount of Mg ions in each. We will analyze the results tomorrow. Here is a picture of the test paper we used. The yellowish colour represents neutral and as you can see , the first 8 dots represent our 8 samples and the bigger yellow dot represents de-ionized water which is neutral. Since they have the same colour,we can conclude that the buffers where neutral.