Week 6 - Thursday

Today I had a meeting with Hama, Makhfousse, Baba, Amadou, and Papa Sam Gueye. During this meeting I discussed in length my summary of the training; what had been accomplished, challenges, some suggestions I had for the laboratory. This meeting lasted much of the afternoon.

In the morning we prepared the samples from retrieval 2 and started a run on the GC that will not be over until the morning on Friday. The computer froze after a few injections so we had to start the run over in the afternoon unfortunately. We are still seeing degradation of some analytes in the inlet, but chose to run the samples anyway to better facilitate training. The samples can always be run again at a later date when the inlet problems are resolved. The problem in the inlet seems most likely to be the glass wool. If I had more time I would have removed the glass wool from the liners and evaluated the degradation and compare the two set-ups. Unfortunately during the preparation of the samples which included bringing the final volume up to 2 ml, drawing off 1 mL, and inserting an internal standard spike Adama noticed that the milliliter marks on the centrifuge tubes were not accurately done. I suspect that this was caused by someones incorrect or sloppy pipeting technique. To ensure it was done correctly and to retrain the staff I marked new centrifuge tubes and we quantitatively transferred all the samples to these new tubes before proceeding. This added about two hours to the whole process unfortunately.

Anna was busy most of the day re-updating the calibration table with the new standards that were run last night. We saved this new calibration table under a new processing method name specific to retrieval two. I was with Anna helping her off and on during the day. Adama prepared the samples and seems to be more and more comfortable in the lab.

Much of the staff's time today was shared between working on this project and another project that had come in a few days earlier looking at pesticides in what I believe was peanut oil.