User:Brian P. Josey/Notebook/2009/09/11

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Ice Buckets and Koch's Talk
Unfortunately our experiments with the gliding motility assay are not going as well as we would want. We figured that there could be a problem with the reagents; water may have contaminated them while they were resting in the ice bucket. The ice bucket that we use to keep the reagents cool on the lab bench uses ceramic pellets with high heat capacity to keep the temperature down. Water was put into it to help keep the reagents cool, but this also made the pellets clump together. This may have led to water entering the microcentrifuge tubes that stored the reagents.

We attempted to remove the moisture by first filtering it out, then heating the pellets in the autoclave. This did not work too well, but the second solution, heating a small amount at a time on a hot plate while blowing nitrogen gas on them, proved to be the most effective solution. After replacing the pellets, we added some calcium chloride pellets to the ice bath to capture the moisture that we noticed was condensing rapidly in the device. This should ensure the prevention of water contaminating the reagents in the future.

Koch also gave a presentation for the UNM chemistry department today. I attended to ensure that I was on the same page with everyone else in the lab. He gave an interesting presentation that covered the work for kinesin. I planned on taking notes through out the entire presentation, and I attempted to, but they were lost to a computer error. The slides for the presentation can be found under the presentation tab for the lab's homepage. Also a link to the slide share web page containing the slides can be found here.


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