Hello SSP,
Another day at SSP began at 8. Remy and I made the executive decision to skip breakfast in favor of a few extra minutes of precious sleep.
We began our morning at Lindley, where Dr. H explained enzyme activity and specificity. Our lab group then dove into the day’s procedures and tackled CA10, which focused on specific activity calculations. It was a bit of a brain workout, but we powered through it together. After a couple of hours buried in CA, we took a much-needed break and headed to IMU for lunch. The orange chicken tasted 10x better since it was my first meal of the day.
Post-lunch, we donned our lab coats for Lab Session 6, (to prepare a 5 N NaOH solution) feeling quite official.The solid NaOH beads looked deceptively like candy, though I’m sure they would taste anything but sweet—probably very bitter.
With the pNPP and NaOH solutions prepared, we got down to the main event: the enzyme activity assay. Our mission was to test the activity of our purified proteins (big shout-out to Dr. Shu for supplying group B with proteins!!) using a generic pNPP assay. The goal was to determine the optimum conditions for
steady-state experiments next week. We prepped five enzyme samples with concentrations of 10, 3,1, 0.3, and 0.1 μM and set up our solutions in Eppendorf tubes.
After arranging the samples in a 96-well reaction plate and taking the initial readings with the BioTek plate reader, we transferred our enzyme samples to the wells. We then used the BioTek plate reader to monitor the absorbance of each reaction well every
minute for an hour.
And that’s a wrap for today! To finish off, here’s a cool picture of Batu. Hope you enjoyed this peek into our day!
