Blogs

i spent the last week writing my scholarly paper and lots of revising. i worked on my slides, notes, and soundclips. i still have to fix my paper because i finally made an outline and have reordered my paragraphs. what an intense research experience!

This will be my last week here at CMOP, I have to say that I am very sad to leave. I felt this summer went by so fast, I cannot believe the eight weeks of my internship are over. I will soon be back to school, to my last year of high school.

Our main project was to analyze model data and data from the Phoebe glider. I felt that Matthew and I accomplished a lot this summer.

I have now finished my powerpoint and have refined it several times, and am waiting to give my presentation. I am a little bit more nervous about this presentation than I am about the last one. This presentation feels so final. I am lucky though because my presentation is on Thursday so I don't have to wait too long.

This week I finished up hybridizing the last 12 samples so now we have all the data we need for a paper.  Mariya is gone this week so I started my paper once done with the lab work. In addition, I also helped Michelle Maier from Tawnya Peterson's lab with PCR product labeling and hybridizing as she will be performing these steps on board in September when the team goes out on a research cruise. So for next week I will finish up the paper and collaborate with Mariya for data analysis.  Also my final presentation is Fri the 14th!

I can’t believe I only have one week left! This summer has flown by. This week I stated characterizing my reactions on HPLC, which is an awesome instrument to use (I’m probably going to be called a nerd for saying this). Monday and Tuesday were spent developing the protocol for running reactions on HPLC. Running an experiment on HPLC pretty much starts off flying blind. There are multiple variables to adjust and you start off by guessing what the right numbers are.

today is Tuesday the 11th, and its time to start really crackin down! the symposium is coming up its really close now!! me and maria gotta start getting our stuff in check and finish our projects!! we sent out our thank you letters yesterday....hope Antonio and Monica like them. but now that that is out of the way we gotta finish the symposium!! i cant believe its week 7 already?? really week 7? wow time really flies!! hahaha

During week nine it hit me that I really wasn’t finished with my project at all. That was a scary realization, but it motivated me to start wrapping it up. I went through all the meta-data I have so far and started trying to fill the gaps. I’ve also written the first draft of my paper. As for daily activities, my week was filled with working on drifters. So far we’ve gotten the pipes, cut them, ground PVC circles to put inside and water-proof them, and we’ve glued water-proof lids onto one end of the pipes. Hopefully their underwater sails will arrive soon!

Wrapping up. One of our Bacillus strains carrying the Fnr-1-deletion narG promoter showed no aerobic lacZ activity (what we expected), while the other strain did show aerobic activity.  Two more strains we tested showed the same results.  Unfortunately I won't have time to do everything required to determine why this happened-I'll be performing another lac assay monday and tuesday to test the hypothesis that nucleotide spacing is responsible for anaerobic narG transcription, finishing my presentation, and that's about it.

8-10-09
-Began LBB time-lapse assay with all mutants relative to wild type.
-Continuing paper and presentation

8-13-09

Well this week was pretty good as far as work goes. I was able to wind my electrodes and overcame some minor setbacks with the epoxy. I was able to fix the ones that broke and preserve the winds, which was nice. Hopefully they will last through my testing for these next few weeks.