Week #1

Introduction to Lab requirements and goal

The first week working with Dr. Andresen was a great success and great experience. We started our Research with a basic understanding of what our goal was and proper ways to work in an environment where all data must be collected and solutions must be carefully made.

Monday, May 15, 2017

On Monday I met with Professor Andresen and his summer research group to discussed the plan and the goal for the research that we are investigating. We went over the basic requirements that we need to accomplish such getting keys to lab room so we can have access when Professor Andresen can't make it. We also went over the websites that our group must used in order to keep track of our progress and find preparation guides for solutions that we might need in the near future. This website is called lab wiki and we can find useful information on how to specifically do a solution and it also gives us the freedom to create our own page where we can post a guide on the techniques that we used to create a specific solution. I was given Abby's and Sarah's work book to gather information on their procedures and work done previous summer's. I was also given articles and books related to the cell and specially Nucleosome Core Particle to learn more about how the cell works and the role of DNA.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

On Tuesday I made 50ml of 1 Mole stock of Na-Cl which is about 2.922g. After creating this solution I added the Na-Cl into a disposable container  of 50mL and label it with the name of the solution, my initials and the day it was created. This was also done to 1 M of Magnesium Chloride hexahdrate and I used 10.165g of stock  creating 50ml. After creating this solution I went to the wiki page and look for the preparation of Tris-HCl. Printed our the instructions and taped them into my workbook, and I made the solution following each step with the help of Professor Andresen, since I was dealing with powerful acid that I wasn't used to work with. This was done through out the day, seeing how I was learning how to used the proper techniques and tools to complete each task, this was all done with the help and guidance of Professor Andresen.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

I started out my day by creating 50ml of EDTA with about 1/2 molar, this translate to 9.3004g of stock. On this day Professor Andresen added NaOH to get the content to an pH of 8.0. While the Professor was doing this, I was left the task to make 500ml of KTM, Ml, and DB solutions. Each solution contain different components such has Tris-HCl, NaCl, and MgCl2. The procedure in making this solutions can be found in documents provided by previous research members. This solutions and data took the entire day, careful measurements were made and tools used were washed to keep a clean laboratory and environment.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

I was left with the task to make more Tris-HCl with pH of 7.5. From what I learned from Professor Andresen, I took careful measurements of the amount of HCl I added to the Tris-HCl in order to control the pH to be 7.5. I also was very careful in handling HCl, by wearing protective gloves and plastic glasses. After creating 50ml of Tris-HCl, I added the procedure to make EDTA onto wikipedia. After this was done I helped Dylan when using the UV-VIS machine, but we encounter some software problems that created problems in our solutions for the nano-particles. The time I had between projects, I read over all the documents that I still had from Professor Andresen, and read more about the structure of DNA in a cell.

Friday, May 19, 2017 

On this day we started by having a group meeting with Professor Andresen and my colleagues. This group meeting was to inform Professor Andresen about our progress in our work and an overview of what we had done during the week. On this day we also got information on software that will be helpful in future research of scientific articles and citations. When this was one, my colleagues and I went to the Science Center to shred DNA and we took careful notes on every step we did. When this was done we launch the DLS machine and got results from the nano-particles with used. During this time we also got more nano-particle from last summer that Savana was using, and to finish the day off I spend relocating the nano-particles into new containers and reading useful articles that Professor Andresen provided, in order to prepare for next week.