User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2010/10/12/Water isotope study

Since I had problems of microtubules falling apart at the beginning of experiments yesterday, I decided to make new antifade. Hopefully this is the reason as to why things were not working yesterday and I can document it as such. If not, then there is something else going on that I am not aware of.

40% H-PEM trial 01
Just to change things up from yesterday, I'm going to do a D2O study first.

So I believe it was the antifade that was causing the initial problems with the assay as I have not had any problem with this one. Although, there seem to be a bit less MTs in solution than there usually are. Not sure if this is just an artifact of me being able to observe the slide quickly or not.

Even the 6% Hg illumination is working. It's weird what happened yesterday.

26% O-PEM trial 01
No problems with things disintegrating at the beginning of an assay. It definitely was the antifade since that was the only thing that I changed from yesterday to today. Besides the microtubules.

63% O-PEM trial 01
Things are working great. Time to take the data.

I should note that there are a lot less microtubules than there are normally. I think this has to do with my stock microtubule solution. I have to make more aliquots today so I'll make sure I take note of any differences with other experiments.

I unfortunately had to remove the slide and add more oil to the objective. I'll take this assay out to 25 ROI just in case there is a big problem with temperature gradients.

The engineering portion of the day
I had to make new flow cells today as well as new antifade. I also removed the micrometers from the microscope stage because they were starting to irritate me. Low an behold I remembered why I installed them in the first place, the Olympus stage irritates me even more than the micrometers do. Suffice it to say, I need to come up with a better solution than the one I have and just using the stock Olympus crap.