Week 6: Revisiting Inconsistencies and Literature Review

Welcome back to my blog! If you are following my project, you know that my research focuses on improving the quality and yield of Multilamellar Vesicles. These are microscopic, multilayered fat bubbles used to deliver drugs and cosmetics directly through the skin, which will eventually allow us to replace painful injections. Over the past five weeks, I have been testing how different salt solutions interact with lipids to increase vesicle formation and uniformity.

This week marks the official end of my data collection phase, but science is never perfect on the first try. While reviewing my images, I noticed a large inconsistency in my dPBS (stable solvent that mimics the human body’s natural conditions) replicates regarding yield and formation. All my samples had varying amounts of MLVs of different sizes. I dedicated this week solely to work out any problems and finalize my results.

I did not want to cherry-pick my final results.  I decided to redo some of the experiments. I re-ran the thin film hydration protocol for a new dPBS batch. I am happy to say that the new samples are all consistent. This means the outlier that I previously got was just a minor execution error during the lipid drying phase and not a failure of the solvent or my protocol.

Since my lab work is finally wrapping up, I also spent a good chunk of this week doing literature reviews for my final research paper. I went back to a research paper by Melcrova and her team about how Calcium cations interact with phospholipid bilayers. This really helped me understand the exact chemistry behind why my Calcium samples from Week 3 were clumping up so much. I also read a foundational paper by M.J. Hope on vesicle generation techniques, which was very informative.  

Next week, I will finally run my images through the ImageJ software to finalize the quantitative data for my experiments.  Looking forward to sharing some exciting results. Thank you!

Samahith