Sunday, July 12, 2020
By:
I have just finished up my sixth week, where I managed to snag a lab at my university to work in for the summer. I reached out to a member of my university's Environment, Health and Safety office and they managed to get me my own workspace in the basement of one of their buildings. I am currently working in a chemical waste storage room that has much better ventilation than my garage, so I am optimistic that I will get more work done. I am also going to be able to order some CHCA and DHB, which are two chemicals used to form MALDI matrices. I wasn't able to get them before because the company does not ship to private individuals, only bona fide labs.
This last week, I mainly worked on stencils. Specifically, I wanted to see if it was possible to get a small spot size with an airbrush. Usually, it is is hard to do this because when putting the airbrush close to the target, the jet of air spreads the droplets out. I looked up common airbrushing techniques to get small spots, and they indicated that stencils are the only way. I went ahead and did some tests with this, and found that I could get spot sizes as small as 200 microns in diameter. I will be doing more work in the future to reduce coffee staining in these droplets, and am excited to be working in my new lab!
Alex Mikulich