Final week, I completed my Laidlaw analysis venture entitled “How does Ocean Acidification have an effect on the Coral Biomineralisation course of”. I had the privilege of working in a lab on the Scottish Oceans Institute in St Andrews, which is a world-leading analysis web site in ocean science, and has an important view of the ocean throughout lunch! Regardless of learning chemistry, I’ve all the time had a specific curiosity in ocean science, and final semester I used to be fortunate sufficient to study ocean acidification in my Inorganic Chemistry module. Studying about what might occur to the ocean’s ecosystem sooner or later from ocean acidification motivated me to do my analysis venture about coral’s mineral skeleton. I walked into the venture keen to realize some analysis abilities and to see the consequences of ocean acidification on the precipitation fee of aragonite – the mineral skeleton in coral with method CaCO3. I learnt that coral reefs are extraordinarily vital to the ocean, as they supply habitats for marine species, shield the land from robust waves and in addition promote tourism. I labored with two completely different biomolecules that are generally known as lipids. These had been palmitic acid and phosphatidylcholine, that are each fatty acids which can be recognized to be prevalent within the coral skeleton 1, and, beneath ocean acidification, turn into greater in measurement. Due to this fact, I used to be precipitating aragonite and including quite a lot of concentrations of each lipids, and to see if the completely different concentrations had any impact on the precipitation fee. I moreover precipitated aragonite beneath ocean acidification circumstances to seek out out whether or not that affected the precipitation fee. These precipitates had been the fruits of my 6 week venture, and it was fascinating to have the ability to have one thing that I had made.
I additionally used an Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in York to see if the morphologies of aragonite are completely different when beneath completely different ocean circumstances. In abstract, my outcomes concluded that Palmitic Acid accelerates aragonite precipitation, Phospatidylcholine has no impact on aragonite precipitation, & ocean acidification decreases aragonite precipitation, however doesn’t have an effect on the position of phosphatidylcholine.
Some reflections after ending my analysis venture:
What I realised over the course of the 6 week venture, was that analysis takes a really very long time. I might solely actually do about 2 or 3 experiments a day because of the preparation being fairly laborious and time consuming, in addition to the experiments themselves starting from 1-3 hours lengthy. There have been instances the place I felt that I wasn’t getting far in my analysis, however because the weeks glided by, I used to be assured that I might get sufficient knowledge to find if there are any traits in my outcomes. I completely loved the expertise, particularly studying new methods similar to utilizing the DIC analyser, titrating beneath particular ocean circumstances within the aquarium, utilizing the SEM to take photographs and acquiring Raman spectroscopic knowledge. It was notably cool to see how my aragonite samples seemed like at microscopic ranges! I’m now within the means of figuring out any traits or variations in my knowledge, in addition to analysing my SEM photographs of 6 completely different samples!
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