This four day week included lots more work in the lab than previous ones. Some of which was set-up for experiments and some was starting those experiments. At Lehigh we prepared many buffers including those for the bead conjugation, the bead diluent, and fresh buffer for when we are ready to run test strips. During these procedures, I taught the process and locations of various reagents. This involved learning how to pH a solution and add the correct amounts of chemicals to the buffers. One random task that was also completed was making a detailed diagram of our device that would aid in explaining how it works to incoming team members or other people of interest.
Outside of the lab, preparations occurred for experiments through meetings with the teams, at Lehigh and OraSure. At OraSure we discussed what we planned to do in the upcoming few days. This included using columns to purify our antibody, using a spectrophotometer to confirm our antibody concentrations after purification, and staining previously striped test strips to confirm that there was suitable protein for testing our conjugations. Some other points of discussion were the results of our ongoing experiment at Lehigh to determine the void volume of our test strip’s components, the possible switch to a different antibody for the bead conjugation, and more analysis of what could be going wrong with our current protocols.
On Thursday I was able to begin working in the lab at OraSure where they taught me the process of purifying and confirming the concentration of an antibody using column purification and absorbance readings from the spectrophotometer. This was a success as we produced a suitable volume of antibody that was an appropriate concentration for our upcoming experiments. We also used staining to test if the previously striped test strips had appropriate amounts of antibody on them for future experiments, which they did. Overall a successful beginning to the set of more serious experiments for the summer.
Sorry for the image quality, canva to blog does not seem to transfer well
