Blogs

We finally completed bryostatin labeling on my B.pacifica samples! My mentor and I continually put it on our "to  do" list but another experiment always got in the way. Anyway, over last week, I finished bryostatin labeling on B.pacifica larvae and ovicells, and B.neritina larvae. I need to spend more time looking at negative controls before I can come to any conclusions about my positive samples... but let's just say it looks like we have some exciting results (look for them in my presentation / paper)!

New project! Woo! With only 4 weeks left I’ve again started a new project. After numerous experimental setups, each more extravagant than the last we discovered that indigo carmine is extremely sensitive to oxygen and it is impossible to keep it in an entirely anoxic environment while still monitoring the reaction. Short of running the entire experiment in the glove box, there was no way to stop oxygen from entering my cuvette and reacting. After seeing this, we decided to switch to nitrobenzene as our model compound.

Not much to report this week.  One of my Bacillus strains gave some odd results in our second lac assay, so I've been working on re-transforming and screening a new strain of bacillus.  I've also been working on transforming a mutated narG promoter into E. coli, without much success (although hopefully today will change that).  My new Bacillus should be ready by tomorrow, which means I can repeat the lac assay and see what's going on.

To start off week 6 we selected more Archaea and SAR 11 samples to be hybridized.  12 samples were selected, labeled and hybridized but only 8 samples were read by the Electrasense platform.  One of the chips had a faulty sensor so our samples were lost., we may have to go back and run PCR amplification on them again at a later time.

To be frank this week was rather uneventful. We basically had to wait for our samples to grow up enough before we could begin gathering P-I (photosynthesis - irradiance) data from them.

Today they still weren't high enough at all so we made some new samples that should be good enough o go tomorrow.

Really not much else to say.

   I am starting to truly comprehend how short my time is here at this internship.  I cannot believe that six weeks have already gone by so quickly.  It’s a bittersweet feeling as I know that I have learned a lot and had a lot of awesome experiences, but I also know that there is so much more to learn and experience.

Last week was busy as always, which is one reason I'm updating this on Monday and not last Friday. Anyway, week six was taken up by my project, the midterm presentation and all the other work that goes on around here. We worked with the glider a lot, trying to get her ready for going out this week. And we're also beginning to work on several drifters which will be placed into the plume so it can be mapped. On Thursday I found out that Greta and I would be in charge of working with the Oceanography camp kids when they come out tomorrow.

So, this week I worked on both ammonium and zinc assays. I did another temperature experiment with ammonium; again, it didn't work out too well. I found that if I put my samples in the -80C freezer for 5 minutes, there was some ice - no good. Then, if I put them in there for 4 minutes and then let them sit in the 4C water bath until I was ready to measure them, they still weren't cold enough, they were only about 8C. So, I think the next time I do another temperature experiment, I'll try to put the samples in the freezer for 4 minutes and just measure them right away.