Question: what experiments do you do in the lab?

Sarah Thomas answered on 21 Mar 2011:

Most of the experiments I do are about making the dyes I need to make the blood test work. It’s not just about making them though, you want the reactions to be clean and safe and give the best yields too. Also, I need to test to see which dyes give the best fluorescence. I’m using a technique called “FRET” where you have two dyes and one of them passes energy to the other which then fluoresces. It’s tricky because the dyes have to work together.

Here is the experiment I did to make the spin label 2,2,5,5-tetramethylpyrrolinoxyl hydrazide, “TMPO hydrazide” for short.

So the first thing I did was get a flask and I put TMPO in it with some acid. It was really hard to get it to
dissolve so I put the flask in a Sonic Bath. A Sonic Bath is like a water bath, but the water vibrates really hard and the bath makes this really load screeching sound like “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”!!

Then I took my flask out and I put it in a nice quiet cosy water bath and I added a catalyst and an activating agent. The activating agent makes the TMPO really reactive!

So then I added Hydrazine. Hydrazine is really dangerous so I have to be REALLY careful. I added a few drops of Hydrazine into my flask with a pipette and then I have to throw the pipette and my gloves into a bleach bath to destroy any trace of the Hydrazine. When I put the pipette into the bleach, it foams and fizzes and that’s the Hydrazine being destroyed.

The last thing I do is freeze-dry the flask. They freeze dry food for astronauts and coffee is also freeze dried. Basically it’s a way of removing all the water from something. But you do it by freezing the flask in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees then you attach it onto a vacuum and it sucks all the water off as it slowly melts!

Then all that is left in my flask is TMPO-hydrazide bonded together.

All that only took me one day to do!