Week 2 - Tuesday

Still no oven. I haven't heard back from Makhfousse on the status yet.

The GC ran at over night and the baseline this morning was steady at 500 Hz for the front detector and 750 for the back detector at 300 C. At 110 C the baseline was around 250 Hz for each, which is much better than before. We replaced the injector needles and rinsed the auto sampler rinse vials and added new solvent. We ran several injections of hexanes (all solvents were newly opened bottles). There are 2 or 3 stubborn peaks that show up in both front and back chromatograms starting at 24 minutes and some high grassy baseline towards the end of the run. Each successive injection showed the peaks at the same height. Most of this work was down by me, Anna also was there to observe and learn. Much of today the CERES staff was working on bring up a Varian GC for some pesticide verification work they had to do. Baba helped them with all of this.

We searched for the 1,000-10,000 ul pipet that was in the lab the previous week and it could not be located. It would be nice to have had it along with pipet tips that fit that autopipet, but this was overlooked until after the shipment from OSU. The other item that would be nice to have would be GC vial inserts to limit wasting standards, but we can make do if we have to.

We washed some ground glass stoppers so we could start making standards tomorrow. We are using an oven that is in the biology lab here that can heat up and past the 400 C mark needed. They are in the oven and will remain there until the morning. Marie, Adama, Vieux, and I participated in that.

My GC work was cut short ~3:00 pm as the electricians had to shut down the power to replace a part in the power house.