Week 4

This week was a little crazy. Because of the holiday, we weren't on campus on Monday, so I missed a day of SEM. I'm getting a little worried about it because I had initially planned to do mostly sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) treated plastics, but I think that the washing process could be simplified. Also, I'm rethinking the value of images of the biofilms at our time points. I don't want to stop taking the data and miss something. That makes the amount of images that I need to get twice as many, and I'm sure that the closer that I take them to the collection the more accurate the pictures will be. We've also started preparing for research presentations. We have a few on the calendar. Tuesday, I had a mandatory meeting about a scholarship that lasted until nearly 6, so I lost some time to work. On Wednesday, I did SEM, and I met with an adviser to complete my applications for graduation. (I'm starting to get excited about graduation!) I also made it the bank to establish an account for the scholarship that I had a meeting about the day before. On Thursday, I went to Grad Trax. That lasted until late as well. On Friday morning, I got to make a "thank you" video that they might show at graduation!!! I hope that I did alright. It could only be a minute long, so I spent the rest of the day torturing myself about who I didn't have time to thank. We spent most of our research meeting that day preparing materials for the research presentations. After lunch, we went to Dr Bi's lab! It was so nice to visit! Amber was there too, so we got to see her as well! It was a great meeting. I got to meet the student that's continuing the project that I started, she was super nice and very active on campus. We invited her to come to the STEAM Club to talk about some of the opportunities that she's had on her campus. I hope she'll come. She's studying to be a chemical engineer. Some pictures of the Earth and Space Exploration Building (also know as ISTB4) are below. It's one of my favorite buildings on the campus, and it's also where Dr Bi's lab is. There are just so many interesting and wonderful displays in this building. These are just a few.

Week 3

This week was difficult for SEM. I’m a bit backed up, and SEM is time consuming. Also, I realize after this week that it’s very important to get the SEM done as quickly as possible in order to get the best results. The pictures after storage just aren’t the same. We also coordinated with forensics on the imaging of our Nile red stained plastics (see my personal picture below). They are sharing a camera for a trinocular dissecting scope. We hope to be able to image the filters with plastics and then estimate plastic contamination. It’s the first time that we’ve really branched into doing any of this kind of quantitative analysis of the contamination ourselves. It’s really interesting. We’re also working on preparations for a couple of research presentations.

Week 2

This week I tried to really get back into the swing of things with SEM. It seems like I’m moving slowly with it to me which I’m concerned about because I want to get through all the back samples. This is especially important to me since the samples that have been in storage don’t have bacillus structures within their biofilms. I really feel like it’s related to the amount of time in between collection and analysis.
I talked to some professors about our protocols for FTIR, and they suggested that I go back to my resources and double check protocols in the literature. I’ve started doing that and already had a bit of luck! Also exciting, we found and shared an article with our Chem PI, and we’ve made a breakthrough on discovering what some of our peaks might be.
I hope that we can get some good conclusions before posters and abstracts need to be done. I’m really proud of the progress that we continue to make.

Dr Ong happened to drop in while I was in SEM, and he showed me a new addition to his microscopy lab. The image above is a penny. The color was a bit more green in person. I was thinking about painting some of our home this color. Dr Ong looked a little shocked about it when I told him so. Anyway, it was interesting that you can totally see Abraham Lincoln inside the monument. I guess that he was always inside on older pennies. I love that a little.

Week 1

It’s week 1 all over again. I’m so excited about our experiment! We’ve finally gotten over 100 days!!! We made some decisions about the best way to process our FTIR samples going forward. I’m taking organic chemistry this semester, and I’m hoping to get a better handle on what exactly I’m looking at on our FTIR. The bacterial films have really been interfering with us getting a good idea of anything that might be happening to only the plastic. Now that we are more confident about removing them, we can get some preliminary FTIR data on the plastic without the films in the way. We’re going to be examining nutrient depletion a bit more going forward. To that end, we are waiting to see the results of a peptone dilution on the growth of the bacteria without any addition media. Lots of interesting things happening. :-)