The research that I am conducting currently is creating a clearer path in terms of what future research I may be interested in doing. My long-term goals involve going to graduate school and hopefully having a lab of my own some day. The maned wolf study solidifies my passion for mammalian conservation and I can really see myself studying mammals for the rest of my days.
Each week, I aliquot and prepare the urine samples I will be running that day. While the samples are running through the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS), I am usually learning something new about the programs that I will use to analyze the chemical compounds in the urine. Marieke and I, during our lunch break, discuss the journal articles that relate to chemical ecology in mammals. I also assist in populating the “Maned Wolf Library”, which is essentially a list of chemical compound profiles that we’ve read about in other papers. We include the name of each compound, the chemical formula, and the 10 highest peaks.
This week, we did a lot of troubleshooting with the program Agilent MassHunter. We were finally able to have the program tell us the deconvolution of each peak. The deconvolution of a chromatograph peak is essentially finding all compounds that contribute to the peak. This ensures that we don’t miss any hidden compounds in our results.
