New Developments

So I had an idea last Tuesday night, and it had to do with Splinters disappointment in our preliminary analysis of the Kinetic Assay. I don't want to sound like a dissenter, but I have a hard time believing that what we are doing doesn't work, it just doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work. And believe me, I started off not believing this whole heartedly, but I have thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that it is RIGHT. So Splinter says, all disappointed like, "Well, we still have fibrin in the gels, so our experiment is a failure." Or something to that effect.

So I says to her today I says, "I was thinking to myself the other day, I thinks, 'Andy you are damned cool.'"

And then I says to her, "You know I was thinking about what you said Monday, about our gels not being porous because of the fibrin still being present. I don't buy it. Why does having some fibrin in the gel mean that it isn't porous? It doesn't, it just means that there is still fibrin there. I think what we should do is prove that the pores are bigger than they were before by putting the gels into a media that has a concentration of some molecule of a size bigger than what the normal PEG pore is and see if it diffuses into the gel. That would prove to ME that we had larger pores or not."

And Splinter being the master of knowledge that she is considered this idea and gave it a thumbs up, and she started considering just how we were going to set up this new experiment! It hadn't occurred to me at that point that the pores had to be large enough to let the fibrin out of the gel, because that was what our experiment we just did WAS, so we know our pores are at least that large! So I suppose we need to step it up by a few microns above fibrin.

This idea and our miraculous data from the Kinetic Assay, which did end up showing us what we wanted to know, verifying the Boss Lady's (Dr. Mahoney) idea that the majority of the fibrin that leaves the gel leaves within the first twenty-four hours. And furthermore it is, like most things that are of any interest to anyone, an exponential decay. Another thing it kinda shows is that the concentration is dependent on there being fibrin in the media, because before the 24hr time point we didn't change media, and after that point we did and looky there it went down again after it appeared to have leveled off. So with this knowledge I bet we will change the media a couple of times before the 24hr point from now on.