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