This week was host to many tasks that seem to lead up to future work. On one side of things, I began by finalizing the budget proposal for the summer, our budget typically consist mainly of expensive reagents (antibodies, latex nanoparticles, etc.) and this one was no different. These reagents will help us restock for the rest of the summer and the experiments we want to run. A second task was with my fellow fellows and the team members who are traveling to Sierra Leone in August. This was to help them develop their questionnaire for the study they hope to conduct during fieldwork and was a priority because IRB approval typically takes a few months to be finalized.
On the more experimental side of things and in the interest of having a working test strip I have been preparing for the weeks to come also. I have communicated with many of the companies that we purchase reagents from in order to clarify certain specifications and ensure that we have all the details we need to troubleshoot our conjugation protocol. One example would be asking about the pHs of certain buffers that come in a kit and are just labeled Reaction Buffer A and B, which provides no information about the difference between them. Even worse, the procedure says to use either A or B, a confusing point in the protocol that we now have clarity on. In the interest of setting up for future experiments, I met with a group of scientists at OraSure to help walk me through certain possible points of failure that could be troubleshooted. This led to my writing procedures for four experiments that will be done this summer, either at Lehigh with the other fellows or at OraSure. In order to prepare the other fellows for the experiments to come I gave a chalk talk on the chemistry and process of latex nanoparticle conjugation and other general procedures that are crucial to the team’s ability to troubleshoot going forward.
Below is the link to the visual my team made this week so that some of our more complicated procedures become easier to learn for newer team members!
