Crap day in lab - (Apr/05/2016 )

I went through the process of making some buffers before being made aware that there were two typos in the protocol that led me to use the wrong reagents. So I had to redo that. And one of the reagents if 7 years old and doesn't seem to be going into solution. SOOOO we ordered a new batch but that is going to take a few days to arrive, which means the downstream protein work that someone put in a request for will have to wait, and they need it asap. So basically I don't know what to do beside sit here and flail my arms until the new reagent shows up. And what if that batch doesn't dissolve either?

I'm going to just let it keep stirring hours if need be and see if it ever dissolves. There could be an error in my calculations / weighing, but we don't have enough material to retry it (another reason we ordered new material). So it's a nice little clusterfuck. Sigh.

The other thing I'm working on seems to be okay though. No precipitation of protein as I was warned might happen, which seems logical to me--it's no more than 30 mg/mL, which should be fine in solution. Just need to run a BCA to figure out final concentration (this is stuff we purified via affinity column).

Fun fun.

Someone might actually be able to help if you were to disclose the secret chemical you were trying to dissolve.

if it's edta then you will have to adjust the pH to near 8 to dissolve it (regardless of age).

Thanks guys. I came back and re-read my post here and in retrospect it really doesn't seem that bad. Man, I'm whiny!

I ended up heating the compound and it went into solution.