Although disappointed that we did not tour the facility, I enjoyed the Houston Waterwork Education Center.  The graduate students prepared more peptides. So, I continue to do more experiments, prepare graphs and work on the poster. I realized that I have not posted pictures of the “inversion test” of the peptide hydrogel tubes so am including a picture now.  I smiled at many of this weeks posts looking more “experimentally data-driven science” as everyone prepare graphics. Looking forward to seeing everyone’s posters!

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.

I enjoyed seeing the diverse labs. I only took one picture of Anna’s bottle of black carbon nanotubes but you can’t really tell how impressive the nanotubes looked in person.

Duplicated making polymer and peptide with mentor. Now that supplies are more available, I starting making hydrogels of varied concentrations of polymer and peptide. First polymer hydrogel was too fluid to gel so to crosslink into gel. Next week will try a higher concentration of polymer. Did have success with the concentrations of K2 peptide hydrogels.  Met mentor on Saturday to run two of my peptide hydrogels on the Rheometer.  I even managed to take a one hour PD course online while data was being acquired. Next week will be busy as I am getting more independent with preparing hydrogels and running Rheometer. next week  I have to learn how to analyze data. z

I have never used social media especially blogging about research. It was strictly prohibited so this is something new.  I did enjoy reading everyone’s posts! I am in a lab that is researching polymers that can house cells. Most of the researchers are bioengineering graduate students. There are also two Rice University undergraduate students. I attended two lab meetings : The Collagen Group & the Polymer Group. I also attended their lab’s journal club meeting. As far as experiments … next week will be a repeat of last week … we will synthesize more peptides using the FMOC method (first picture) and prepare polymers (second picture).  The content of the peptide will be determined using Mass Spectrometry. The polymer will be tested using a Rheometer.  I  just had a learning “experience” with blogging as site did not want to load the pictures of the equipment … likely because  I cut the picture from my PowerPoint. Click here to see the Mass Spec and Rheometer … Equipment-2li5byu