Blogs

This week is BIG for the community of Hydaburg. We have culture camp and then totem pole raisings on the weekend. Culture Camp is where we all get to learn and teach about our culture. This week my Mentor Wendy and I did a class at the culture camp. We brought the kids down to the the mouth of the Hydaburg River, picked up about 50 lbs of garbage, looked at some macroinvertebrates, and told them why it is good to have a clean environment.

8/2/10:  The DyNAzyme didn’t come today, so instead I made some changes in my PowerPoint presentation that I used for the parent night event.  I also did some reading in the microbiology text book I have checked out from OHSU and did more research on primer design for PCRs.  While I was not able to do any lab work, my reading on primers and PCRs was very informative.  I was also told that the DyNAzyme will be coming tomorrow, so this is something to anticipate.

nZVI detecting IP measurement is working really well.
My mentor (Jim Nurmi) and I thought of a better set up for the field application. Rather than trying to put electrodes in ground to measure IP under the ground, we decided that making a flow-through cell will be more efficient. I would set up a pump at a location and pump groundwater through the IP set up, then back into the groundwater. If the measurement is taken over time at various distances from the source, it is possible to even calculate the horizontal velocity of FeCMC-BH particles.

This week I continued to settle samples and count M. rubra under a microscope. We also went back to Astoria again, however, we stayed over night in order to sample a full tidal cycle and also set up incubations of water samples for 24 hours so that we could test different conditions.
I am also writing my paper and preparing slides for the presentation.

8-9-10
Edited presentation
Performed practice talk for Wendy, Rick, and Carolyn. Followed up by more revisions to the presentation.
Edited paper, submitted final draft.

8-10-10
Continued to edit presentation. Adding scale bars, removing old scale bars, correcting fonts, etc. Gave practice presentation again.

Lab meeting

8-11-10
Practice of final presentation in the actual room we will present in. Afterward, began work on 2-page summary of project and lab notebook updates.

As my seventh week at CMOP comes to an end, I say good bye to an old friend, palladium. After playing with my data in Igor, I have decided that the addition of the element palladium to the titanium dioxide catalyst is far worse that the addition of platinum, so I will no longer be running tests with it. A song I once heard seems fitting for the occasion, seeing as we have been listening to an old radio all day in the lab: “Nah nah nah nah. Hey hey hey. Goo-ood bye.”

Monday this week was just another day at the office.  Writing a research proposal, debugging the program, basically all the normal work activities.  But Tuesday was a lot more interesting.

 The jet lag I experienced in North Carolina quickly wore off as I came back to Oregon. I am really excited to be back in the lab. On Monday I designed a primer that is still specific to Katablepharis, but starts in a different region than I had previously attempted amplification. As stated in previous blogs, I was getting partial sequences of Katablepharis 28S. This newly designed primer will hopefully amplify the complete sequence, which will size in at about 3000 base pairs. I am very excited to see the results of the PCR using this new primer.

8/2/10
   Katie, Michael, and I went to SAT 03 and cleaned the tubes out with bleach. Katie and I cut some electro-mechanical (EM) cable for SAT 01 and prepared it for deployment.

8/3/10
   Katie, Michael, Greta and I went to SAT 01 to replace it. When we got their the EM cable Katie and I made broke so we all had to go back to the shop to repair it. After it was fixed we went back out to SAT 01 and successfully deployed it.

8/4/10