Blogs

interviewed Honorable Elizabeth Furse. forget about my hairdo!

interview questions, video interviews, and working on page 15 for the final paper (at least half way done).

started working on my web article and checking my sources, with the help of my furball.

8-5-09
-Inoculated all mutant strains and WT into 2.5mL LB broth @10:10am @RT
-Finish final touches on Furse paper
-Continue Final paper
-Continue final presentation work

8-06-09
Gathered samples from a nearby river, two of them field-tested LBB positive.

Hard to believe it's almost over. Well this week was all about continuing to gather the data for the model and then playing with the model. I went ahead and set up the model in MATLAB such that I can call it with different sets of parameters very easily and have been running multiple sets of parameters each day. What's difficult is that there isn't any actual data out there for the growth of the elements of the model we have over a long period of time, so we don't necessarily have any data to use to try and calibrate our model (with a Monte Carlo simulation most likely).

Well this week has had both its frustrations and its joys. I did get my sensor to pick up particles magnetically, which is a great proof of principle. Today I am going to try and film the particles as they stick to the surface, which could be pretty cool. I'll try to put it on the blog next week if it works.

Week eight was a long week. We began with a day focused on Pt. Adams, where we began the fabrication for the surface level at the station. I also worked on the part of my meta-data project that outlines the maintenance process at Pt. Adams. On Tuesday we went to CBNC3 to see if the seabed CT could be coerced into communicating, apparently though, it didn’t feel like it. So after that we went back out to Pt. Adams to work on installing the surface station. Wednesday was spent working with the radio link system as there was a mutiny among the SWAP Nodes.

This week I is my seventh week because I wasn't here for the first week.  That means I have three weeks to finish up my project, write my paper, and create my final presentation.  Yikes.  I can't believe how fast this summer internship has gone.  This next week I will be moving on to the DGGE.  If we get it right the first time I should be a great place to work on my paper at the end of next week because Suzanne will be gone and I will have data to write my paper on.  If we have troubles with the procedure which is possible because it i

So there I am, in the lab, going about the purification as I did the day before and the day before that... when all of the sudden, my pump stops working! It just doesn't work anymore. Crap. Me and a few other people in the lab look at it, but no one can really figure out what is wrong, it had literally been working fine 24 hours earlier! We try changing some of the tubing and switching in new solution to no avail.

There is an ongoing joke this summer of me switching projects every 2 weeks. Well guess what…it has been two weeks since I made the last switch so in keeping with tradition of the summer I have a new project! Well sort of. After two weeks of trying to get the uv/vis to monitor my samples accurately I have found that the uv/vis is terrible at monitoring solutions containing anything other that de-ionized water (and sometimes not even that). Samples containing NOM or any sort of stabilizer had too much interference to be able to observe the reaction accurately.

 The week started with me running the gel for the 24x PCR reaction that tested all of the available primers and the pooled DNA extract template. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful for almost all of my primer sets I ran several other experiments to make sure that nothing was wrong with my methods. Yet, while I was able to get amplification throughout the week I had still been unable to get the 16s primers to amplify so I will need to continue testing to see if I can get that to happen.