Last Day!

Today was officially the last day of work in the lab, and it certainly was a busy one.

We have been rushing to get some last minute results with a new method.  We have been methylating the fatty acids in hopes that they will separate better on the chromatogram.  Our theory is that replacing the -OH group with an -OCH3 group will cause the fatty acid to not stick to the column as much, providing cleaner peaks on the chromatogram that do not have so long of a tail.

When we checked our results this morning, the internal standard was the best run we have had so far! We accidentally made the samples in the wrong concentration, so we had to rerun all of them, but we had high hopes.  Late tonight, Neelam and I went back to check the GC/MS and found awesome results.  There were few background peaks in the saliva/water sample, and fatty acid peaks in the oil/saliva sample look great.

Results like this are great to see and provide a promising future for the project.  I really hope that I will have the opportunity to continue doing this with Neelam and Dr. Splawn because I feel that we can start quantifying our results and publish something official, which we hoped to do over interim but ran out of time.