Progress: Sample Preparation, 3LCAA, and More!

Hey readers!

What a week... we are in the home-stretch of data collection! Last week, I went in the lab on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and all day Saturday (anything to get the data we need on time!). But, of course, my amazing readers don't care about the time I spent -- you care about what I actually did and what goals I accomplished.

So, as you may know, the goal of my project is to optimize HemaDrop™ by finding the ideal combination of coating and substrate (to create the optimal level of hydrophilicity) upon which to solidify blood drops uniformly, quickly, and cost-effectively into a film.

To do this, there are basically 3 main stages of work in the lab for me:

1. preparing samples, 
2. characterizing the surface energy of each of the samples to quantify hydrophilicity with 3 Liquid Contact Angle Analysis, and 
3. testing the uniformity of the sample quantitatively with Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry and qualitatively with observations. 

Due to technical difficulties (the fridge becoming a freezer and freezing all of our coatings -- there was literally snow in the lab), I started this week behind schedule -- our work in preparing the coatings the week before was worthless. So, on Tuesday, I re-made the secret sauce (aka, proprietary coatings) and prepared the substrates (microscope slides and Si wafers) for application. 

Dr. Herbots said that two of the coatings looked like beer, so I posed like this... it was wild.

One big change that we decided to make was to only use 1 type of microscope slide (borosilicate -- they're so accessible that you can actually buy them on Amazon and get them in 2 days #PRIME). The reason for this reduction in number of substrates was that the soda lime slides were not pre-cleaned and not sterile. Using these slides would introduce a great deal of error and even potentially compromise our other samples. 

But, don't worry, we won't be reducing the number samples... we're actually testing another coating with a different type of metallic nanoparticle (I can't reveal the identity in this blog unfortunately, but I think I can in my research paper), so now we have 2 substrates (microscope slide and Si wafer) and 5 coating treatments (no coating, metal 1 at high concentration, metal 1 at low concentration, metal 2 at high concentration, and metal 2 at low concentration). 

So, for all of you counting (I try not to nowadays...) that's 10 different possible combinations, with 2 of each combination being made (1 for characterization with 3LCAA and 1 for blood application) -- so 20 samples! We actually made 3 of each individual slides as a validity precaution to make sure the coating was applied correctly to at least 1, so that's 60 samples, but we will only end up using 20, so don't even worry about those for now.

For 3LCAA, we went in on Saturday ready to perform some measurements, but ants had attacked our store of alpha-bromonaphthalene (a mouthful which is the hydrophobic liquid that happens to be the poison used in ant traps, so ants love it unfortunately for them and my schedule).

In this meme, the most interesting man in the world represents the most interesting hydrophobic liquid in the world!
Also, I didn't bother removing the beer from the meme, because I figured we could just call that coating ;)

Additionally, the samples are extremely hydrophilic, so when we apply the DI water drops to measure the contact angle, the water is spreading out and wetting the samples. So, we devised a plan to reverse the usual order and start with alpha-bromo and then apply the water, so the samples would not be ruined from the first liquid (water) spreading out. We'll see how that goes -- worst case-scenario, we just use each of the 3 of identical samples we have.

So, after a few hours of purging the clean room in which we perform the 3LCAA of ants, we decided instead to perform 3LCAA all day on Monday (tomorrow) and work on making sure our samples were prepared well and ready for analysis. The samples are now sitting in the laminar flow hood in this apparatus:

We mac-gyvered a sample drying rack from sterile pipettes and aluminum foil, in a minor engineering feat!

I am confident that we can finish the 3LCAA characterization by tomorrow and (LATEST) Tuesday. Then, the plan will be to, in conjunction, start applying blood on the samples Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (and recording qualitative observations with my updated coding sheet). Then, on Friday RBS can be performed on a majority of the samples...

However, I see data collection with RBS taking 2 or 3 sessions, so I think that my data collection could spill into the week following the February 19th deadline (probably Wednesday). I understand that this is not ideal, but since I will have all the 3LCAA and qualitative observations finished along with most of the RBS performed by the 19th, I can definitely work on data analysis in that period as we fill in any data not collected yet.

I am working as hard as I can, and I would embrace working in the lab most days and analyzing data at home in the evening. Anything for the data! Moreover, I can write my results with a few blanks for data if I have to. My meeting with Mrs. Haag is on Thursday (3/2) rather than Tuesday the week that the Results are due, so that could also potentially give me a few days to write it up.

Sorry for the extremely long and slightly serious post, but I wanted to give you guys some specifics on my progress and plan for the next 2 weeks.

Although this week was intense, it is definitely exhilarating to be in the lab working on an experiment I designed, so that's awesome. 

On a personal note, I have exercised for 7 days straight, so hopefully I can keep that up too! 

Cheers,

Yash

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P.S. Thanks so much to Grady Day and Alex Brimhall for helping me out on Saturday... I can always use the extra hands!