Week 3-4 in Princeton

My name is Jacky Ziwen Jiang and I am working in McAlping lab at Princeton for this summer. It has been four weeks and our research has been going pretty well.

As the first two weeks were mainly about planning and chemicals ordering, we turned in to the actual working mode the past two weeks.

The main material we need to prepare is thylakoid, the main factory where photosynthesis takes place. To get thylakoid, the method is not that simple as just cut leaves into small pieces. First of all, we need to choose the right plant leaves for the thylakoid extraction. After reading certain amount of articles, spinach leaves has the relative high concentration of chloroplasts in their leaves, which we will choose for our experiments. After we bought the spinach, there are two more buffers we need to make for the thylakoid extraction. One is grinding buffer and the other one is washing buffer.

The whole process is filled with multiple complex procedures. First of all, the precise measurement of different chemicals we need takes consistent attention without vacillation. After that, I need to use a lab blender to blend the mixture of alginate leaf pieces with grinding buffer. After we get the solution, we will put it into the centrifuge for the pellet. During this process, I also learn new knowledge of the unit conversion between rpm and g, which show the rotation strength. The pellet we get need to go through another step, which is called resuspension. In this step, we put the pellet into the washing buffer and do the resuspension procedure. Then, we need to go through few more times of centrifuge to get the concentrated thylakoid.

The solution looks clearly green and fresh. These two weeks’ experiments give me a great learning opportunity of thylakoid, which gives me a further understanding of the knowledge I have learned in class. This is a great example of practice the knowledge I learned in actual experiments.