Week 4- More Troubleshooting

I received terrible news recently—the GC-MS is broken. But I unfortunately received that news after I spent all of last week running different samples on the machine, trying to get good peaks and refining the protocol. I tried different methods, messing with split, injection methods, emissions and voltages. However, since the machine was broken, none of my work actually amounted to anything, so I’ll be looking into other machines (LC-MS and HPLC) for the time being.

I also was able to test out large metal beads as a cell disruption method and the test run was successful! I’ll be going in tomorrow with fresh leaves to properly run the protocol and see if I can finally see some target cells with my stain, and hopefully there’ll be something under the microscope.