Team:Exeter/Notebook/Oct12
Monday, 12 October
Lab Work
Mark sent us images of the tubes we had left in the shaking incubator on Thursday, containing purified carbonic anhydrase as well as calcium chloride. All of the tubes including our negative control contained crystals. Adam posited that these were probably calcium carbonate crystals (since CO2 would dissolve and form carbonic acid, which would react with dissociated calcium ions from calcium chloride, resulting in calcium carbonate and HCl). However the fact that crystals were present in our negative control means it was impossible to tell whether the carbonic anhydrase protein has contributed to calcium carbonate precipitation.
Matthew suggested using IR spectrometry to determine whether the crystals were CaCO3 or not and Chloe suggested using a Western blot analysis to check whether the carbonic anhydrase proteins had been successfully expressed. She mentioned that we probably would not have time to do much else before wiki freeze.