Creator: Liam J.
Today we had a full day of laboratory work planned out, so many of us were not looking forward to running assays all day when we woke up. Our lab had previously attempted to run docking simulations of the inhibitors we will be testing, but many of us had trouble getting results that looked correct, so we couldn’t proceed with the inhibitor screening for a short time. Luckily for us, Dr. Mark Hall, the designer of this program, was in the labs today to help us with our MOE work.
With our models complete, we now just had to run the docking trials and wait for them to complete, which took longer than expected. Once our docking simulation finished, we compared our results within our research group and we were ready to start our inhibitor screening assay. Since we had written the procedure for our assay on Tuesday, we only had to perform our calculations for our solutions and run our assay trials.
The assay was a lot of work to set up, since it required many different solutions and we had to screen for many different possible inhibitors. Once all our solutions were ready and loaded into our 96-well plate, all we had to do was add our substrate solution into each of the wells to initiate the reaction, then load it into the plate reader and run a dynamic reading. After 25 minutes, our first trial of screening was complete, and we exported our results into our flash drive. We left for lunch, then repeated our protocol to set up and run our second and third trials of our triplicate, and got our results for both. Since we finished all the trials we needed to, we could leave the lab and have less work the following day. Overall, it was a day busy with lab work but still rewarding in the end.
