Yesterday I looked through my algae test tubes and I found these little things that were visible to the naked eye, they looked sort of like hair which was a little weird. The test tube that I saw it in was the control with no treatment to it just plain Rio Salado water. Matt and I identified to species of blue-green algae one was Nostoc, and the other one was Chroococcus. The picture below is Nostoc but when we first identified it, it looked some what different. This is a picture of a day old algae out of water.
 

The Bacteria Stuff

I have been playing around with various types of bacterias in the lab. I was told, after this particular project, I was going to be quite the biology expert. Starting this, I was a bit skeptical of that statement. After only doing two of the 10 test needed to be done on 9 different bacterias (to start with) I am slowly becoming a believer.

This is a project that is going to be done within two different people to ensure that the results gathered from each individual is good. The goal of the entire project is to get every bacteria we have available and run many of the test on them to ensure we still dealing with a good set of chemicals and materials.
As I had mentioned before, I have only scratched the surface with solely two of the test done, but I expect to be done by next week with the rest, hopefully. :(

On a more serious side, I can say this project has helped me a lot with doing many of these test, and doing them correctly. That is a big thing I have taken from the whole project. Well I guess that all. Ohh yes, I almost forgot, I had a bit of a set back in the beginning because the ink on the plates that had my grown bacteria had smeared off when they were put in the refrigerator. I almost cried, but I kept my cool and realized I had taken pictures of each individual plate and named them. So, can you say problem conquered? :)

Heres a picture of my Salmonella after it has been plated on TSA and incubated for a day. I felt this was the more cool looking one that just had to be shared.

I started my second set of pea plants and currently I'm waiting for their week cycle to finish so that I can record the result. Today I started on my Algae project again but it came to a stop because i didn't have any pond water to work with because they forgot to get me some so now I'm going to wait until Wednesday so that Matt or josh can get me some pond water. I have made all the solutions for the experiment already so that I can start it right away on wednesday

It's been such a long time....

Since the last time I was able to blog I was finishing up my yogurt project. I have now been involved in a different project which consist of things, in my opinion, more disgusting than rotten milk. My project is to determine whether temperature has an affect on the respiration of different insects. So far I have been able to test this hypothesis out on crickets and worms, in the temperature of cold and room temp. Here is a little bit of my results:





Graph one:  Worm's Oxygen levels at room and cold temp.



Graph two: Cricket CO2 levels at room and cold temp.



What these graphs basically show is that as temperature decreased so did the respiration of these insects. Although I did feel bad for possibly killing off half of the crickets in the Phoenix (not really, don't worry) but I did end up getting some useful results. The bars that are found on the graph are called errors bars and what these bars indicate is that the majority of my data results are found between these lines. What I was taught was that if these bars would have overlapped then my results would've been insignificant. These bars state that there is a significant difference between the two sets of data and that is a good thing. :)

The way that I tested this out is through a device that records the levels of Oxygen and CO2 for 10 minutes creating a graph and giving a slope. I ran this device 10 times on a set of 6 crickets then 6 worms in both a room temperature and cold temperature (on ice). This gave me a set of 40 different slopes, which I averaged to get four individual slopes which then became the data that helped me create four different graphs, similar to the two above. I am very happy to report that I do not have to kill anymore insects, hopefully.  

10/8/12

As I finished running the PCR experiment I have started and I'm almost finished with writing a procedure for it step by step so that one of my colleges will be able to do it in a shorter time while fixing/adding separate steps to acquire the best results possible. Today I will be blowing out eggs to collect the shell for one of the labs and its a little boring and messy but it should pass time very quickly.

During the past couple of weeks I have been working on a PCR for PV92. PV92, a human-specific alu insertion on chromosome 16. The PV92 genetic system has only two alleles indicating the presence (+) or absence (-) of the alu transposable element on each of the paired chromosomes. This results in three PV92 genotypes (++, +-, or --). The + and - alleles can be separated by size using gel electrophoresis. When I first started this kit I got no results from the primers or from my extraction which resulted in a busted so I started all over again and ran the experiment multiple times until I got some result. About 4 weeks later after multiple attempts I finally got some results but I had to change the procedures just a small bit. The procedure asked for a .9% saline wash to remove the cheek cells from your mouth but instead I did the 10ml of saline wash and 10 ml of DI water and mixed them. After that I centrifuged it multiple times until I got an average size pellet at the bottom of the pcr tube. This procedure change helped me with getting results even though they were not the best results one should expect. I'll probably have to run it again so that I acquire optimal results. Also after this PCR experiment I will continue with my previous experiment on euthrophication in a more in depth research based project.  

Summer

Last month I worked on a bunch of things ranging from cleaning tables to preping labs and things of that nature. The most recent project that I worked on was a photosynthetic pigment experiment. In this experiment I had to extract pigments from different vegetables spinach, and purple cabbage. During the next couple of weeks I will be repeating this experiment but with more vegetables to test the different wave lengths that the pigments can absorb. I will also be creating a video like presentation about photosynthetic pigments.