About every two weeks “Dana´s Kochstudio” opens. On the menu card: POP, short for Particulate Organic Phosphorus.

Analysing POP filters, resulting from sea water filtration, starts with cooking them with an organic dissolving reagent in a normal household pressure cooker. In the hot water steam of the pressure cooker temperatures higher than 100°C are reached, which are needed to break the molecular bonds, transferring the organic phosphorous compounds into inorganic form. In the following the now inorganic orthophosphate can easily be measured photometrically following common methods of inorganic phosphate determination.

The way of a POP sample: from a filtration rack to a household pressure cooker…..

… into the hands of my motivated helpers Maren, Peter and Saskia, pipetting reagences. (Pictures: Dana Hellemann, Jana Meyer, GEOMAR.)

So when you see me running through the floors with a big pressure cooker in the arms, hearing me saying “hej, I am off cooking”, you should better not expect a nice dinner to be cooked as it´s usually the lab (my Kochstudio) I am heading to- and not the kitchen.