Happy New Year! Updates from the lab, Part 1

Happy new year everyone! I hope this post finds everyone happy and healthy and ready to do great things in 2017!

The fall semester was a busy one, and I have lots of exciting reports to catch you up on! I’m taking advantage of the winter break to fill you in, and hopefully I will manage to get all these updates posted before school starts again!

My first handful of posts will be related to the lab work that you all so generously supported. I’m going to start with a bit of an introduction to the building and lab itself, then the wonderful undergrad who worked over the course of the semester to prepare samples for analyses, then some background about the analysis itself. I’ll wrap up with what results we have received so far and what the spring semester is looking like. Then I’ll post a few other updates about adventures related to science education and outreach, and plastics research in the Atlantic Ocean!

First, where does the research happen? Once samples are collected from seabirds in the Bering Sea, they need to get transported to a lab where we can measure phthalate concentrations in the samples. In our case, we transport our samples to our home base at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) campus. 

 

This is the Conoco Phillips Integrated Science Building (CPISB), where the Applied Science, Engineering, and Technology (ASET) Lab is located. ASET is the lab that runs the phthalate analyses. I am rather partial to this building, as it is where I have taken many classes, taught many classes, done a ton of lab work and data analyses, and have had my office over the past several years (although I recently moved my office into another building last semester). And for a grad student, office is somewhat equivalent to home with all the work we have to do, so I consider this building my second home.

 

 

There is also a very cool sign inside the building that has thank you and welcome translated into several Alaska Native languages – I have always been fascinated by this sign, and love how unique each language is. It really highlights just how diverse Alaska is, and reminds me that I live in a really special place. 

 

It really is a lucky thing that analyses can happen right on campus, instead of shipping them to a distant lab outside of the state, because it allows me the opportunity to become a bit familiar with how an analytical chemistry lab functions, and perhaps be involved with a few steps in the process (or have some undergraduate students and teachers be involved in the process), such as sample preparation. It takes years of training in chemistry and technical mastery to run an analytical chemistry lab (so many moving parts on those machines!), and as my training is in biology and ecology, I would never be able to do this work solo.

If we shipped the samples to an off-campus lab, scientists would run the analyses and simply email phthalate concentrations for each sample to us in a document. In the end, the phthalate concentrations are what we need for our research objectives because ultimately we will perform statistical analyses to compare phthalate concentrations in groups of birds from different regions of the Bering Sea, etc., to better understand whether or not certain populations are more at risk of phthalate exposure than others (more on that later when I report current results).

But, there are lots of steps that go into measuring phthalate concentration in a sample, and if we shipped the samples off-campus, all of those steps would be relatively unknown to us. Personally, I’m not exactly comfortable with that “black-box” scenario, as I really want to understand all the work it takes to collect the necessary data to achieve research objectives. So having ASET in CPISB allows for me to at least wrap my head around just how much work goes into measuring phthalate concentrations. More on that in the next post, below is a short tour of ASET in pictures...