Blogs

   This weeks highlights were the boat outings and finding a project.

   For my project, I'm building a map. This map will be used to track the glider's progress as she moves up and down the coast collecting data. The reasons a new map is desired over the old one is because the old one has very limited information. The new map will have more features including depth contours and latitude/ longitude coordinates. So far, I've been familiarizing myself with the mapping software and searching online for data to put into the software.

This week I spent my week at Sharp Labs of America (SLA) and was able to see first hand the biosensors I am helping design.  It was very interesting to be able to see the gold surface of the electrodes under a scanning electron microscope.  There has been some complication with the cleaning of these biosensors, and so various treatments were performed, and my goal this week was to test the biosensors using oligonucleotides to see which treatment works best (doesn't disrupt the gold surface, but effectively cleans off a previous run).

This week Vanessa, Bill Lambert, and I took a trip to Quinault. There we spoke to Joe Shumacker about possible projects. We initially thought that I would study the effects of shellfish intake on the Native Indian populations. However, when we met with Joe he told us of another issue that they need help with more. There is an issue of fecal contamination up the coast, which causes many problems for the tribe. Molluscan shellfish are extremelly important to the Native Indian Tribes. It is a part of their traditional lifestyles, and it positively impacts the economy.

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.

 The cough that I've had since finals week progressed into a case of pneumonia. After a weekend trip with the doctor, I spent the first part of the week in bed trying to rest. I'm glad to say that I'm feeling much better now and was very anxious to get back to work.

On Thursday, Pete, Sheedra, Deirdre, and I took a field trip to collect water samples. In Oregon we took samples at Hammond, Chinook, and near the Rogue Brewery in Astoria. In Washington we took samples at Ilwaco. The weather was beautiful and the sun was out too. (The picture below is from Hammond)

This week I learned how to settle Lugol water samples on a microscope slide and count M. rubra. There was none found, however, the bloom has not started yet. I was also able to see crytophytes and M. rubra under the microscope so that  I can locate them in the samples that I will settle later. I also did more extractions this week. I was able to obtain positive results on my 16S and Rbc PCRs, which means that my project is going along well, after some trial and error PCRs.  

Calibration curves are an excellent asset to analytical chemistry; most often they are the key to calculations relating the absorbance of a solution to the concentration of colored reagents in solution. Since all subsequent calculations are based on the calibration curve, it's worth one's time to make sure each one is accurate.

Hi Everyone,

My name is Naomi Shah and I am a rising sophmore at Sunset High School. I am working under Dr. Baptista.

Today is Friday and the end of my first week here. We (the high school interns) will be here at CMOP for eight weeks (37 days) total. Again, my frontline mentor is Grant. To start Grant gave me three classroom activities to be translated into Spanish. Because I have been doing other things, such as MatLab tutorial, I have only been able to complete one of the three activities he gave me. I must say that even though I am a native Spanish speaker it was difficult translating these scientific papers from English to Spanish.