This summer, my student Hannah worked on one of my research projects with the goal of developing a flow-through analysis of total antioxidant capacity. Measuring antioxidant content is difficult because the term “antioxidant” can mean any variety of compounds in a substance, and therefore different approaches to analyzing antioxidant capacity can yield very different results.

Our hope is to design a system that can perform multiple analyses on the same sample. To do so, we need to be able to perform each analysis in a small volume. That’s where Hannah’s project comes in. After learning how to perform one of the assays “the normal way”, she worked on performing the analysis using the OMIS millifluidic system coupled to a spectrometer. Much of her summer was spent dealing with background stability and learning how to program using the Wolfram Language, but she did end up with a system that could measure ascorbic acid in small volumes.

Here’s Hannah, working on her project (and in the cleanest part of my lab, mind you). Brockport students involved in summer research are encouraged to present their work at a fall poster session. You can download Hannah’s poster below (not quite sure what WordPress is doing, but hopefully it works).