December Break

So I have not posted in awhile. Our group was given a small break for Christmas, which I must say was desperately needed. I have been sleeping in and really enjoying not living by a schedule.
On the other hand I am excited to go back and get busy again. Our cultures are all in the fridge to slow growth over the break and I have a large fungi article to read before we all meet again so its not like I have NOTHING to do, just very little. Oh, on a side note I got a telephoto lens for my camera which I have been using like crazy so the macro lens has been put aside for a while, not to worry you will still get lovely fungi pictures to oogle at. :)
Happy New Year!
-C

A Little Update

Here's a cool picture I took, it's a reflection of a bench and the sky in a puddle, I really like how it looks so I thought I would post it because I have no fun fungi pictures for you to look at. :( Oh I have been meaning to add a link here, but I LOVE photography so I have a profile on Deviantart, please check it out and if you have a profile too, add me! :) Here's the link:
http://irishgirl72.deviantart.com/ I am mostly into nature shots and what not.

So I apologize for not posting in a while, I have had a crazy month! I thought I could update you on what has been going on in the lab!

Our PAH experiment is almost complete, I still have like six plates growing so I figure I can keep measuring them until they finish growing. And entering week 2.5 on our Diesel experiments most of the fast fungi have completed growth on all three diesel concentrations. (control, .1% and 1%) It's a lot of measuring plates, and repetitive work so it's boring to talk about and sometimes boring to do but it is interesting to see what strains finish first or do good with this contam. and not that one, etc.

Well have lots of Biology homework to get to, thanks a lot Prof!

-C

The Autoclave Adventure

So I thought I would post a little story from last week. Janet and I were staying late in the lab to finish up pouring some new plates for our new diesel experiment when we noticed the autoclave had a bunch of mold in the bottom of it. This is really odd because the autoclave is a oven-like contraption that sterilizes anything that can fit in it with deionized water, so there should not be anything for mold to grow on. While still puzzling about this we set about our business measuring, mixing and autoclaving our media. It wasn't until half-way through our pouring did we notice that a few of the flasks were missing some media. We wondered where it was; then it hit us, the autoclave. We took a look at the bottom of the autoclave and you know what we found? A whole lot of media that must have boiled over and accumulated at the bottom of the autoclave.

Great, now we have a huge mess to clean out of the autoclave. We had to wait a long time for the media inside the autoclave to solidify so we messed around waiting to clean it up. We took tons of fun pics and even organized the lab a little bit. It was a grand time.

Look at all the plates we poured!!

Here's what our media looks like after it's done in the autoclave, you can see the difference in volume from left to right!

Once the media in the bottom of the autoclave was solid we started cleaning,

And cleaning and cleaning! It took quite a while to get all that sticky stuff out of there!

Ewwww!! Look at all that gross stuff!

Anyways, it was a grand ol' mess but we had a good time cleaning everything up. Other than that story not much exciting has happened in the lab, our PAH experiments are almost done and we just started our diesel plates. The first measurements were today and I was excited to see I did not contaminate any of my plates! (Considering I transferred 60 that's pretty good!) Well, that's about it for now, I promise I will upload some more pics this week seeing as I just got a new camera from my dad! He surprised me with a Sony alpha300, I love it! Just have to read more about it, it's a little more advanced than my last camera!

Catch you later!

-C

Update

Just thought I would update my blog, I have been pretty sick the last week so I am more than a little behind on everything. But, I have been measuring my plates, most of my RBBR plates are done or close to done and a few of my PAH plates are close too.
I missed collecting from our plots on Thursday so I don't have much to talk about, I promise I will make it up somehow.
This weekend I was feeling a little better though, so I visited one of my friends and on the way to her house I saw some mushrooms in the middle of a field. This made me very excited so my friend and I went out into this field and picked these mushrooms last night. I think they are some kind of Agaricus, they might be edible but I'm not taking any chances! The really cool thing about them is that they smell a lot like almonds, really light and sweet, this is a good defining quality so it should help someone a little more experienced than me identify them.
Well I don't have much else to say, I promise I'll blog a few times this week.
Later-C

RBBR Update And Hunting

RBBR Update

I promised I would post what good growth and bad growth on the RBBR plates looked like so here it goes.

On the left is an example of a plate that was not very successful, the RBBR dye is still very visable and the fungi did not grow too far. The plate on the right however is a very successful plate because not only did the hypea reach the edge of the petri dish it completely decolorized the plate.

In this photo, the plate on the left has decolorized more of the media than the hypea have grown over, this also means this plate is successful with this contaminant, but it is a slower growing fungus, so it is not exactly what we are looking for. The plate on the right has grown a fair amount of hypea but has only decolorized a minimal part of the media, this would still be a successful decolorization but it is too slow of a grower and not efficient enough for us to really use it.

I also thought I would show you how we take the measurements on the plates every other day, we use the millimeter side of the ruler and place the plate on a light table to see the total hyphal growth from left to right and top to bottom, same goes with the decolorization. Some of the plates are much harder to measure than this one is.

Hunting

Today we also picked our plots and spent a few hours in the rain, we found tons of soggy mushrooms everywhere, so we decided to bring some back to lab to id and photograph!

This guy was enormous! The stipe was so thick you had to hold it in your hand like an ice cream cone. I think it is a common fall mushroom, although it is inedible it's still very fun to find these guys because of their size. According to my sources they are very easy to find, but I was still excited to find it!

This is the underside of a giant "shaggy parasol" (a Lepioda rhacodes I think) mushroom, Janet, Joey and I found a whole bunch of these guys on campus and brought a few back to the lab to brag about our mushrooming skills. The funny part was we didn't even have to leave the trail to find them. They are semi rare mushrooms that are apparently quite good to eat if prepared right.

This is another big one we found, Clitocybe gigantica, another common fall mushroom, but again, HUGE!!! I just love finding the big ones! I think again this one is inedible.

This one is called Stropharia ambigua, it is a fairly common mushroom as well, with a yellowish cap that is pretty viscid, and very obvious white veil remnants around the cap. (this is the wrong view to see that) and dark spores. (You can see the spore color well in the gills.)

Our plots yielded much smaller mushrooms than these guys but hunting for mushrooms is very exciting no matter where you go!!

Well it's off to bed for me! Catch you guys next week!
-C

Week Six

So I know I haven't been really good about Posting every week so I will post a BIG one today updating you on what we have been doing the last two weeks. Last week we combed our plots for more mushrooms and cataloged them. I finally got my pics to upload so here are a few pics of what we found.

We didn't positively ID this guy yet but he is a lot bigger than what we normally find.

This Guy was actually almost dead so we didn't keep him but he's a type of mushroom called a poly pore, this is a type of almost woody mushroom that grows on trees and logs and can live a lot longer than most mushrooms!

We found both of these guys in our conifer plot , the first one was in the ground and Joey spotted it, the second one was on a fallen log. It is definitely becoming obvious that we find many more mushrooms in the hardwood plot than in the conifer plot. I think this has to do with the soil pH.(It's probably more acidic in the conifer soil. ) At any rate our catalogs for both plots are growing larger and larger. We will walk our plots again tomorrow to grab any new mushrooms we might spot.

Our RBBR experiment is almost wrapping up, a few of the fast growing fungi have totally cleared the blue dye, (none of the one's I am measuring!) but a few of mine are really close. I also measure those again tomorrow. Here's a picture of the set up.

You can see the plates with the fungi colonies in the center, we took plugs of each strain of fungi we have and placed them on plates of RBBR. Every other day we have been frequenting the lab to take measurements of growth and decolorization. Tomorrow I will take a few more pics to show you the difference between a strain that does good on the RBBR media and one that does not. Tomorrow I might even have a strain that finished the experiment and completely decolorized its plate! I can also show you what the data sheet looks like that I fill out every time I take measurements.

We will also be starting a new experiment tomorrow with a new contaminant and control so I will be busy transferring plugs and organizing plates. For our RBBR experiment, we didn't run a control plate but this time we need to be able to measure the difference in growth rate between contaminated plates and control plates. I am excited to compare my results with Joey and Janet's to see just who really had the best plates to measure. (I think Joey did!)

I have also been watching mushrooms around campus to bring into the lab and id, tomorrow I will take a few photos of a whole population I have been watching and maybe try to culture a few of them for our fungi library, some are easier to culture than others and I am not sure if the ones I have been watching are what we are looking for.

Other than that I have just been really, really busy with school. I am really taking too many classes this quarter and I think next quarter I will either take a break from math or take stat. instead of calc. because math is just taking too much time out of my day. I have decided to stay at PC for another year and I am thinking that next year I will just take just math and physics. (Which should finally give me enough time for all my homework!) Right now I am spending so much time in class I haven't got a lot of time for work outside of class other than on the weekends. I still have a chemistry paper to write and a biology write-up to start, and math just keeps piling up! I am counting down the days for this quarter to end, thankfully it's pretty soon.
Well, I will blog again tomorrow! Until then,
-C

Week Four: The Beginning of RBBR

So this week our group started our new experiment, the RBBR experiment. Janet, Joey and I each have about twenty different plates of fungi we are in charge of measuring and monitoring.
Like I said before, we culture fungi from mushroom specimens found in the woods and grow them in petri dishes. For this experiment we transferred plugs of the fungi onto plates dyed with RBBR blue dye. We will measure the fungi's effectiveness by watching to see if and how long it takes the fungi to turn the RBBR plates clear. (It is a lot easier sounding than it is!) It's hard because judging growth and decolorization on the plates is not always easy with slow growing fungi. We take into consideration the hyphea (the roots if you will) growth and the decolorization rate, which, more often than not, is not the same. We will be measuring the growth of the plates every other day, so it means we have to spend a little time four days a week in the lab, which is okay except it means having to work that time into my schedule. Like tomorrow I have to stop in the lab to measure, probably before my math test; which I am nervous about, because math is a hard subject for me. Anyways, have to get studying discriminates and completing the square, catch you later!!!!
-C

Week 3

So I have been terrible about keeping my blog updated; I have just been so busy!!
(It doesn't help that I'm not into blogging either.)
OK so anyways, since the last time I wrote I have learned so much about fungi!! It is amazing.
The first thing you have to know about fungi is their role in nature. Fungi are detrivores or decomposers, they break down natural compounds. (mostly things that contain carbon like wood.) They are one of the few organisms that can break down lignen, a complex carbon compound, in a timely manner. Without fungi our world would be a wreak! There would be years upon years of fallen trees littering our forest's' floors and most antibiotics would not exist.
Unlike many people believe, fungi are not just another plant, they belong to their own kingdom and are not autotrophs. (They are heterotrophs, they get their energy from other organisms, not the sun like most plants do.)
Another interesting fact most people don't know about fungi is that mushrooms themselves are just the fruiting body of the fungus, not all fungi create mushrooms!! (But all mushrooms are fungi, have I lost you yet?) In any case, fungi are identified (in the field) by the mushroom they produce above ground, in a similar fashion fruit trees can be identified by their fruit. The difference however, is quite easy to see once you try and identify a mushroom you just harvested. For most mushrooms you must know every stinking detail about them, compare them to descriptions and pictures in a book, and make an educated guess. I'm guessing more than half the fungi kingdom can be described as a "small brownish mushroom with gills." Identifying mushrooms is about the hardest thing I have ever tried to do, I honestly think it is near impossible without consulting at least five books and a fungi specialist.
So I guess I should explain why I suddenly know all this cool stuff. It's because I am working for a company that uses fungi for soil remediation purposes. That means if you have property that has been heavily trafficked and, let's say, is contaminated with diesel oil, you can hire them to come in and use fungi to remove the diesel, pretty cool huh? So what am I doing you ask?
I am basically a lab rat, I get to help run tests using various contaminants to see what fungi breaks down what contaminate in the lab and then apply that to real life. The hard part is finding a mushroom that breaks down something like diesel fast in the lab, but can also live and do it well in real soil as well.
Right now we are working on some test plots in the woods, seeing what kind of mushrooms appear in a patch of hardwood versus a patch of coniferous forest. It is pretty exciting but very time consuming work.
I am working on it with my lab mates Janet and Joey; they are great! Janet has been working for this company for a while and knows all the lab work and experiments pretty well. Joey is new like me, but he knows much more about science in general than I do. In fact the first week we started working I was really intimidated by how much more Janet and Joey seemed to know then I know, but both of them have been in college and science classes a few more years than I have. I realize now they are both very nice and very helpful and I am very excited I get to work with them this year.
Well I should really get to studying my biology notes, I have a test tomorrow!
Until Next week! -C

My First Blog Entry!

Wow I never thought that I would ever be caught blogging, but here I am and I am sorry to say I am a little excited about it!
So I suppose I should introduce myself, my name is Colleen and I am an eighteen year-old freshman at Peninsula Community College. My goal right now is to finish my AA Degree by June, (Which I am on track to do.) and then see about getting my Associates of Science Degree as well before transferring to a university.
I like fastpitch, the color blue, penguins and other left-handed people. I am mildly OCD about some things, like planning my days; I like to be organized.
Anyways, I will be blogging the next year or so about my adventures in the REU program at Peninsula College so be ready to see more about what I love and a ton of what I learn along the way.
Later, Colleen