Blogs

Monday: 8 am meeting till 10:30 and met Sergi Frovlov, had a professional development meeting regarding resumes and CVs, developed first and second drafts of abstract for Charles, had a short meeting with Charles making sure I have the programs I need and talked about what to do next. I started reading from the Python tutorial.

I was only in the lab on Monday and Tuesday of this week because I was on vacation Wednesday through Sunday. 

This week I had some problems with the qPCR I was preforming.

This week was all about hydrogen peroxide(H₂O₂) . The H₂O₂/amplex red protocol, which I have been practicing, was used to measure the H₂O₂ concentration in a minimal medium with bacteria called pseudomonas putida GB1.  We want to test if the bacteria would produce H₂O₂. So far we only have collected six time points. My mentor, Matt and I planned to take another point on this coming Monday.

This week was a short one and mostly involved cell counts. I managed to reach my 15 counts a day mark, so far my record is 17 though that might go down since the slides I am counting are becoming more populated, and I may have to start diluting the samples soon in order to count the cells more accurately. I have not yet decided if I want to increase my goal for now I think it’s best to keep it on the safe side and stay at 15 until I see how it goes for the next week.

This week's work was cut short by the 4th of July, but it feels like I got a lot done. The majority of my time this week was spent on extracting DNA from 9 more soil samples. It took me a little longer than necessary to complete the extractions, because I didn't want to work with too many of the samples at once, so I did it in two batches. I wasn't too familar with the technique yet, so I wanted go more slowly and make sure I didn't make any mistakes.

This week ended up being pretty short due to a family trip and the 4th of July holiday. I was out of town with my family on Monday and Tuesday. We stayed in Chiloquin, in the Klamath Basin, and fished all day in my dad’s drift boat on the Williamson River. I caught some trout, and it was a lot of fun! I was thankful that my mentor was understanding and flexible so that I could join my family on this trip. Since I was out of town Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was a pretty busy day! Our to-do list for the day took up an entire sheet of paper, but we got it all done!

   This last week consisted of lots more PCRs and cloning samples for sequencing, and while both of these are fantastic tools that work efficiently, they can be long and somewhat tedious, especially when dealing with 50 samples.

It is not uncommon for the rotifer to be cultivated as feed for the home aquarium.  They can be purchased online and grown in your garage in a five gallon bucket with a small air pump.  In commercial production they are grown in large concrete tanks or big plastic containers, some of which look like large zip-lock bags.

This past week has been a busy one, I have spent as much time as I possibly can on getting more cell counts done, my goal is to try to get through at least 15 samples a day or preferably more so far I can finish about ten in 2 hours or in three for the slides with higher cell concentrations. I have also been reading over protocols for ROS assay and saxitoxin ELISA, since I will be needing these when I get further into my experiment and I want to get familiar with what I will have to do now instead of waiting and learning it all on the spot.