S-STEM Scholar Alex Hugenberg-Cox Blog

       After the conference we took a few days, spending some time cleaning up from the project and discussing some if the things we weren't able to get to like discussing the gram stains as well as looking into the UV comparison more as some of the other groups didn't get to finish their comparison. For the gram stains we theorized that the cells started to die earlier causing gram stains done two or so days after to give false results. We also theorized that the R2A UV results may have been different if we didn't plate on R2A again after UV exposure, as it may have starved the struggling cells.      With the characterization project effectively over for us, we were tasked with coming up with a set qPCR procedure, including set reference genes. Because we need to test each of the reference genes in deinococcus we need to perform qPCR on all of them, however from the original list of recommended reference genes we were able to narrow it down. Looking at " Table 1 Sele

 Overall the path to getting the poster for the conference was very rocky but the conference ended up going well and I felt confident when presenting. This poster discussed the various characteristics of D. sonorensis, mainly biochemical but also morphological. However a large part of the poster was looking at the differences in plaque structure when grown in different nutrients and looking into what the meant for the cell. There was also a small amount of genomic data and an example of our methods for the UV exposure.  Final Introduction-             Deinococcus sonorensis was isolated from ground soil of the Sonora Desert of Arizona in 2005. Like so many members of this genus, D. sonorensis is radioresistant, but notably presents with a sticky biofilm structure. This  biofilm has made culturing and accessing the cells more challenging and thus relatively little is known about the cell biology of the species or the nature of the biofilm. Our core objective in the current study is und

      As we lead up to the Conference, we are redoing the last few tests that need to be done, running the UV analysis for sonorensis and working on the poster. We redid the MRVP tests, the Citrate tests, and the sucrose test as well as ran the catalase test and two UV tests comparing D. sonorensis on both TGY and R2A, comparing the plaque structure of both and its ability to survive UV radiation.      For the catalase test we simply dropped hydrogen peroxide on the colonies and observed to see it it formed bubbles or not. When it did form bubbles we knew that it has the enzyme catalase. The citrate and sucrose tests were color changes. For the citrate test we could see an obvious difference this time between the positive and negatives, and could tell that it was not able to utilize citrate. The sucrose test did have a slight color change this time but not enough to define it as a positive or negative, so it remains inconclusive. The procedure for the MRVP test was the same as last ti