The new "toys" at work

Yesterday Maria's new computer arrived, so now she can spend a lot of time optimizing it for herself. But most time will not be playing around, but trying to understand the menus in Office2007, there's another layout than the older versions (our home computer has Office 2003 student version). Also trying to make the labnotes in OneNote is new, so there's a whole new program to learn how to handle.
During the afternoon today Maria spent a few hours in front of the instrument she will be using a lot during the nearest months - of course a mass spectrometer. The Orbitrap was installed during March, so no one in the group is an expert on the instrument so far. A mass spectrometer measures really small weights, and the Orbitrap should be very precise. Part of her work will be to identify the compositions of the different molecules in her samples, being able to decide how many atoms the molecules include (as well as if it is carbon, hydrogen or oxygen). The project will study metabolites in poplar, correlating different concentrations to different phenotypes.