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Week 4: A Waiting Game

Submitted by Graham Frank on July 27, 2010 - 2:22pm

     My fourth week at CMOP consisted mostly of me monitoring the subcultures from Roberto’s PC2 experiment from April, waiting eagerly for them to oxidize. With the Halomonas LOB-5 it's been the same story, waiting to see manganese oxidation, waiting to see the colonies turn orange or brown. I did look at a handful of the cultures under a microscope, mostly the RA26A subcultures, and determined that within those there are at least two different types of cells, one that is motile and another that isn't.

Week 3: Growing things

Submitted by Graham Frank on July 16, 2010 - 1:18pm
Returning Monday from a week-long absence due to cross country camp and the ASE Midsummer conference, I found myself forgetting where a few things are around the lab. Roberto took every opportunity to poke fun at me for it, say that my brain had "gone to mush" while I was gone. Jokingly, of course.

Week 2: Peptide Capture 6

Submitted by Graham Frank on July 2, 2010 - 3:55pm

     On Monday, I had my first experience with the method I'll be working with this summer aimed at capturing manganese oxidizers from ETM samples with specific peptide binding. One sample uses a specific peptide that someone else found to bind to manganese oxides, another sample is a random mix of peptides as a control for nonspecific binding, and a third sample is just water as further control. This time, peptide capture 6 (PC6), we experimented with the synthetic manganese oxides that we made last week.

Week 1: Synthesizing Mn-oxide

Submitted by Graham Frank on June 25, 2010 - 1:52pm

This week, for the most part, I have been working on synthesizing manganese oxide for use in a later experiment. This mostly consists of adding KMnO4 to NaOH slowly while it stirs and then adding MnCl2 to that even more slowly. On Tuesday, I spent about an hour adding these things drop by drop, only to later discover that the pH of one of the NaCl washes was too low and that it would have to be done again the next day. After that it was mostly just a lot of centrifuging and washing in NaCl.

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