Chemistry Boogaloo Week 4: MALDI Madness

Howdy!

Man, this week really flew by! Just as I’m starting to get the hang of things, this whole experience is about to be over. This week, we did quite a bit of testing of our boronic acid mixtures that we set up last week. We’ve been trying to mix up some stuff that’s going to be good for layering onto our surfaces, but testing has revealed that a large portion of our mixtures haven’t worked out. Here’s where the MALDI machine comes in. MALDI stands for matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization. It’s basically a gentle way of fragmenting our peptides that would be harder to read by more conventional methods.

This is an example of a MALDI machine. The one in the BRC is quite a bit bigger! We also have a speed MALDI, which essentially just gets it’s results quicker.

Maldi Prep

First, you have to prep your samples to put onto the MALDI plate. These samples have been mixed with a matrix which helps the samples crystallize onto the plate.

MALDI plate

Each one of those bubbles represents a single sample. You can run many experiments using one MALDI plate, which makes them ideal for the kind of testing that we’ve been doing.

Once the samples have been read, we get data that looks like this. You can see the different fragments of whatever was on the plate and their molecular weights displayed at the peaks. We can tell if our compound has modified by how heavy the tallest peaks are.

Hopefully next week we can test out our newly modified surfaces and get some more data!

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