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rebeccmeisterThis week I have been assaying the hemolymph samples I collected from the California cricket species, to measure how much protein, carbohydrate, and lipid they contain.
No big surprises with protein or carbohydrate, and in addition, I did an amazingly good job with the carbohydrate assay, so that was great.
The lipid assay today...did not go quite as well as I would have liked. In general, lipids are a pain in the butt. I'm too tired to even describe what went wrong and why, but I'll try again tomorrow. Not everything went wrong, really - I had around a 50% success rate. It's just the other 50% that are frustrating.
No big surprises with protein or carbohydrate, and in addition, I did an amazingly good job with the carbohydrate assay, so that was great.
The lipid assay today...did not go quite as well as I would have liked. In general, lipids are a pain in the butt. I'm too tired to even describe what went wrong and why, but I'll try again tomorrow. Not everything went wrong, really - I had around a 50% success rate. It's just the other 50% that are frustrating.
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Date: 2017-05-26 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-26 04:26 pm (UTC)Basically, because logistics, we've been collecting these samples into a chloroform-methanol solution in 2-mL plastic safeloc Eppendorf tubes. Chloroform-methanol leaches hydrocarbons out of plastic. So as a control, I also set up all my standards and treat them exactly the same as the samples, running them through the whole dry-down and re-extraction. For some reason, the standards for the second half of the samples are, in a lot of cases, much darker than the samples. That includes blanks. But I suspect part of the problem could be that the vanillan assay isn't stable for much longer than an hour. So I'll try again...