Week 9: Final Presentations

This was the last week for many of the interns, and final presentations were given on Thursday and Friday. Since I started a week later than most interns, I still have another week of work to do on my project, but still gave my presentation this week. In addition to preparing for my presentation, I also continued running samples and processing data. The real-life frustrations of science presented themselves on Wednesday, when my senior scientist informed me that a large portion of my data would have to be reprocessed. Despite the last-minute change, I was able to pull everything together and draw some new, interesting conclusions. It would appear that the Merey oil may not have been undergoing significant biodegradation. It’s unclear though at this point what was causing that degradation to occur.

Next week, in addition to continuing the fluorescence tests, I will also be doing more cell counts, and attempting to analyze the cell count data to determine population change in each flask. If the cell population has some correlation to the intensity of the fluorescence peaks, that would reinforce our understanding of the relationship between the microbial activity and the concentration of PAHs.