IT'S GETTING REAL

My ordered starch assay kit came in the mail yesterday!
And so, today I stayed after school from 3 until 6pm to perform my first ever starch assay, but first on a control (cornstarch) to standardize my procedure. I used 1 mg, 5 mg, and 10 mg samples of cornstarch for this experiment.

Today basically involved a lot of precise massing, measuring, tube-cleaning, labeling, incubating, timing, diluting, pipetting, adding, mixing, waiting, and pipetting some more, transferring...and a lot of reconstituting materials beforehand - all the reagents, the 80% ethanol solution, and the 12N Sulfuric Acid solution... (<-- Yikes I know)

(Actually, after Dr. B finished making the 12 N H2SO4 solution, I felt the bottle, and it was hot. Like, hot hot. Hot like a stove. Or a steaming mug of hot chocolate. Or your favorite actor/actress! Or my school's theater when the heater goes on overdrive! ...You get the idea. )
(And that is why, folks, always remember to add acid to water, and not the other way around. #lessonsfromAPchem)

It was a 3 part procedure (one that I had typed up and tailored a month prior). The first part was the sample preparation; this time around it was extremely manageable as I was already working with finely ground cornstarch. The second part, was the starch digestion. Order matters here: I wound up adding first 80% Ethanol solution, then alpha-amylase (then heating the enzymatic reaction), then adding what was titled, "Starch Assay Reagent" (then incubating that), and finally diluting the samples and proceeding to the glucose determination, part 3.

ACTUALLY IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE that I stopped right after finishing Part 2 today, due to time constraints (Basically, it was 6pm and if I stayed any longer, the school would have probably kicked me out.)

So, after diluting each sample with distilled water, the last step of Part 2, I refrigerated the samples overnight at around 2-8˚C - not exactly the original plan, but hopefully it won't impact my results too much. Fingers crossed, and we'll see how tomorrow morning goes...