Amino Acid Solutions

This Tuesday (February 12th), I went to RPI for my weekly internship meeting. This week, I was in charge of making amino acid solutions to be used in the peptide printer. First, I had to calculate the volume of the solution that needed to be added to each amino acid powder. I was given each of the 20 amino acids in their powder form in separate tubes. The mg of powder in the tube was labeled on the side, along with the three letter abbreviation of the amino acid. I was also given a sheet of the dilution concentrations (mg and mL) for each amino acid. Using these numbers, I had to calculate the unknown, which was the volume of solution that needed to be added to the amino acid powder. For example, if the given concentration was 2 mg / 10 mL, and the tube contained 0.5 mg of powder, I would need to add 2.5 mL of solution. The concentrations for each amino acid were different, so I had to do that calculation 20 different times. After my calculations were finished, I went to the lab next door to use the fume hood to create the solutions. To do this, I used an Eppendorf that measured in microliters. The maximum volume that the Eppendorf could hold was 1000 microliters, or 1 milliliter, and the average volume I needed to add to the tubes was 4 mL, so I had to add the solution in smaller amounts. After each amino acid, I had to change the tip of the pipette to prevent contamination between amino acids. After adding the specified volume of solution to each of the 20 amino acids, I took the amino acid solutions back to our lab. There, I used a vortexer like the one shown below to dissolve the amino acid powder in the solution. Some were much easier to dissolve due to their polarity. These solutions will be used in the peptide printer to print arrays of peptides for future experiments. 

I'm looking forward to finding out what I will do next week!