Day 4 - Hands-on experience!

Day 4 of our attachment! Today, we were posed with our first task as a team - to create multiple solutions of different dilution. This will then be used to determine the concentration of an unknown sample.

We started by pipetting a known volume of sample into a vial and topping it up with water. Then we extracted a portion of this sample into another vial, where we topped it up to the same mark with more water.

Next, we took turn to pipette out samples into a 96-well plate and placed it into a spectrophotometer. The spectrophotometer measures the amount of light that is absorbed by the sample object. The program plotted a graph of luminous intensity against concentration of the sample. The ideal gradient we were supposed to achieve is 1.0!

The three lab mice waited anxiously for the reveal of the results! Amazingly, the gradient we got was 0.99 - a mere 0.01 shy of the ideal value. We also learnt the application of Beer-Lambert's theory in spectrophotometers to measure concentrations of samples.

This ended day 4 of our attachment! Excited to find out what challenge awaits us tomorrow! :)