Back to the lab!

Be a butcher!

I don’t want to say but… I did kill 58 fishes by myself! Pray for them!✝✝✝ Cut off the head, peel off the skin, remove the bones and organs and clean the blood.

Smash them to paste!

The pretreatment of samples

The pretreatment is a series of operations to extract the fatty acids from fish flesh. It usually includes three key steps: hydrolyzation, saponification and methyl esterification as well as extraction. The pretreatment of each fish usually takes at least 5 hours if everything goes well and the operator is skillful. To ensure the efficiency and the accuracy of the experiment, it would be better to deal with 4 samples at a time.

The pretreatment requires much patience and time for each step. The fish flesh must be clean and with as few impurities as possible; The usage of reagent must be in the right sequence; The operation of transferring solutions between vessels must be fast and accurate to guarantee the protection of fatty acids and in case it might be oxidized.

The whole fish ends up to a small bottle of fatty acid solution.
Gas Chromatography (GC)

Retention time method and standard curve method were respectively used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of samples to determine the property and the concentration. The analyzation of fatty acid samples takes 57 minutes for each.