King's

Adding diluted blood samples to solvent.

Mixing samples before putting them in the "bath."

On Friday at King's, me and my co-worker Havisha finished up samples to put into the Mass Spectrometer. After punching out spots from patients blood cards, we put the spots into little tubes. We then added water to the tubes to try to bring the blood out of the card and dilute the blood. After diluting the blood, we added Trypsin to each sample allowing the hemoglobin protein to break up into small peptides. Each sample was placed into a "bath" of 37 degrees Celsius, which is the optimal temperature for Trypsin to work. After about an hour, we took all the samples and extracted the diluted blood and put it into solvent that would stop the Trypsin from breaking down the protein and dilute the blood again. Once the final dilution was made, we placed all of the tubes into the Mass Spectrometer for it to read the masses of each peptide, determining if the peptide is a disease causing peptide. Tomorrow we get to read our results, I hope we find an unknown variant.