Week was productive with acquiring data about the self-assembling peptide hydrogels using the Rheometer, CD Spectrometer and IR Spectrometer.  I am having to review information about functional groups that I have not read since Organic II Chemistry and Graduate School. Geez … I forgot how “unintuitive” and complicated reading spectroscopy data is because of correlating functional groups with their wavelengths.  For example at the lab meeting it was explained that  the negative “dip” at around 215-220nm in the CD Spectroscopy graph indicates the protein self-assembled into beta sheets. I am still working on explaining the graph even though I now know “what” the data should look like. I am learning the latest version of Excel to graph my data (see below). 

I started working on the poster Friday.  Although I still need to truncate some data points at the beginning, I think the graphs will be good enough for the poster.  I just have to overlay the data series into one graph.