Helping Lani and Preparing for the Conference

 

    This week was very uneventful. Chad had put our project on hold for the week, and we instead spent our time helping Lani both with final poster prep and the initial stages of the DNA extraction project. While they had started the project over the summer, the samples they had were in the wrong elution and would need to be redone. 

    We spent the week doing graham stains, inoculating broths and plates, making gels and refilling more pipette tip boxes than one would thing possible. 

    All in all we did a lot of busy work that to us wasn't much but helped others when they were to busy to do it themselves. 


    The conference itself also went well. This was the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science conference. There was a wide variety of posters that were all very interesting and covered a wide array of topics. Two of the ones I spent a good deal of time at was a poster that studied bite forces of sharks compared to body mass, and one that studied plants to hear ultrasonic noises they emitted under different levels of stress. 





Pictures from a few of our graham stains:



this batch of D. roseus was found to be 
contaminated and therefore was unlabled
in the picture.



this set was done by both me and malica, but she ended up
taking all the pictures as my phone had died by that step
















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summary of 'the effect of magnetic field on the activity of superoxide dismutase'

  Magnetic fields are created when electrons spin. Normally electrons are paired, and if they spin in opposite directions from magnetic fields cancel out. However in free radicals the electron sometimes are unpaired or a pair electrons spin in the same direction, in this case the magnetic fields are not cancelled out. Most enzymes are not affected by these magnetic fields, however some are. This experiment is to determine the amount of effect of a magnetic field on the enzyme known as superoxide dismutase aka SOD.   SOD is a catalyst that catalyzes the conversion of superoxide free radicals into O2 and H2O2. This experiment was to study the influence of magnetic fields on SOD activity, to see how it would affect biological processes. They tested this by exposing SOD to EMF for various amounts of time then measuring its activity by measuring its reaction to oxygen. To conduct the experiment, the SOD enzyme was combined with Na2CO3, methionine, NBT, EDTA, PBS, dH20 and riboflavin Sol
Read more

Aquaticus Lyse

Image
      In the last blog I mentioned moving onto another project with Kieran, trying to replicate a D.rad lyse onto aquaticus. Before I could start with the procedures I had to make the solutions and create the protocols. It was a lot of dilutions and changing the pH of things, but I also had to make an EDTA solution.       To make the multibuffer I would need, I started by making 100 ml of 50 mM sucrose, and 100 ml of 10 mM tris-HCL. After making those two solutions, I made 100 ml of .5 M, pH 8.0 EDTA. While it was simple enough to combine the ingredients (18.61 g disodium EDTA- 2 H2O and 80 ml water), I then had to change the pH. The original pH was around 3.4, so it took a while, dosing it with HCl to raise the pH and cause the solids to dissolv e. After the EDTA was diluting the 10% Triton x-100 to .1%, which was done when creating the multibuffer. I ended up making 100 ml of multibuffer, with 8 ml of the EDTA solutiom, 5 ml of the sucrose, 1 ml of the 10x Triton x-100, 1 ml of the
Read more

Linear Plasmids, Restriction Enzyme Ligation and Plasmid Extractions

Image
  Linear Plasmids, Restriction Enzyme Ligation, and Plasmid Extractions   The project I’m currently working on is linear plasmids. We’re trying to take a plasmid from E.coli that contains a gene called tet that codes for tetracycline (an antibiotic) resistance, and remove D.rad’s (Deinococcus Radiodurans) lux.s gene before incorporating tet into the spot in D.rads genes where lux used to be.   On Monday we decided to separate into two groups and try two different methods of removing the lux and replacing it with tet. While the other group will be doing the original overlap PCR, our group will be trying restriction enzyme ligation. Both groups will be performing the same basics, but going about the process in different ways. In the end we’re just trying to find which process is more reliable and efficient.   Before we could start doing restriction enzyme ligation, we needed to create more plasmids, as the various experiments over the week have depleted our supply. Using New
Read more