Wrapping Up January

Wow! It's the last week of January, what happened??!! Time went by so fast this month, I just can't believe it. I think that I need to update you on our recent lab activity. We have been busy! Janet, Joey and I transferred our "master copies" earlier this week. It's not a huge job but it does take a few hours to make the new plates and then a few more hours to take plugs from the old ones and transfer them to new plates. We are all very excited to run a new experiment because we all have a few new strains of fungi to monitor. Every time we successfully culture from a mushroom we document and dry the mushroom and assign the new culture a number. Most of the time we use numbers so that we don't start to remember the names of the fungi, that could bring bias into our study, but, it's also easier to write a number on a plate. (Most fungi names are LONGGGG!!!!) So we all have five new strains to run in our experiments. We will probably rerun a RBBR, PAH, and Diesel experiment another time. Before we can really think about publishing or even share our data we need a few trials to stabilize our numbers, and hopefully, lower our margin of error.

Our other latest endeavour was soil particle suspension. We prepared plates with anti-bacterials and fungi food to pipette washed soil particles onto in hopes to get some fungal colonies directly from the soil. We took the core drilling kit into the woods and took some samples from our plots. We then washed those sample and separated the particles by size. We decided to use the smallest particles we could to test out this suspension method and our plates have been sitting for a week with little to no activity. We're not 100% sure but we may have killed off the fungi with all the chemicals on the plates, or, we suspended the soil particles wrong..... Who knows. We're planning on trying again but until then we are monitoring our plates.

Our sawdust and mulch experiment is going good as well. All our samples seem to be growing but most have not spread too far from the plug. Hopefully this week growth will speed up a bit.

I'll try and take a good pic of my fastest one so far, it might not turn out so well but whatever.

Well that's about it for now, our group is meeting tomorrow for our weekly article discussion, this week we are reading about PCR on fungi because that is something Tom wants us to get into soon. It's something I am really interested in, I have always loved learning about genetics and all those sorts of things so it's fun stuff to read about.

Other than that I got nothing else to really talk about, school has been horrible the last three weeks, just busy and chaotic. I'm trying to keep it together!

Anywho, Oh I wanted to post a pic so here!!!

My awesome view of the mountains from my kitchen window!

Later! -C

Week Two of Winter Quarter; Lab Party!

Hey so on Friday Janet and I stayed in the lab to set up a new experiment pretty late, I think we spent 6.5 hours just getting things set up. It didn't help that our building is being combed through for all the lab equipment, nor that it takes autoclaves so long to heat up and cool down. But we really had a blast, we got to talk about some personal things and just hangout and it was great! Oh, we also got Chinese together because it was so late. We decided next time we were just going to bring our sleeping bags and have a slumber party in the lab!
Our new experiment is interesting, we are taking our five fastest growing cultures and placing plugs in flasks of sawdust, that green mulch they use for hydroseeding, and a mixture of the two. The mulch was pretty messy and we had to do it all by mass not volume so we had to measure out 10g of both on an old scale. It took longer than a digital scale would have!
Like I said though, we were there for a while so while we were waiting for the autoclave I read a chapter of my biology out loud to Janet, she liked that. :p All in all we had entirely too much fun! (Only science nerds like us would consider that fun, but hey!)

Oh and because it's awesome here is my quote of the week:
"It's good enough for government work."

2009

Well Happy New Year! I can see this year will be filled with lots of new opportunities for me, especially through the REU program. In the mean time, I have been reading like mad!!

Over break our fungi group was assigned this interesting 30 page article, (book would be a more appropriate term) it was hard to get started, but a lot of what the paper discussed ties well into what we are doing (or hoping to do) in the lab. I can see where most of our procedures came from with all the recent readings this year, I think every one of them had at least some major procedure that we also use in the lab.

The one thing I had an issue with on this current reading was that part of it focused on trying to bring out all of the different types of fungi in a soil sample, in order to get an appropriate idea of species diversity and richness. This is all well and good for population and species diversity studies, but I always get back to the point that we aren't looking to mess around with all the different species of fungi, mostly just white rot fungi. So why are we reading about procedure to coax the slow growing fungi into growing on media?

It's not like I didn't enjoy learning some of the procedures, it was great! I just have a horrible habit of approaching assigned reading with one question in mind, how does this relate to what I am doing and what am I supposed to take out of this reading to relate it back to my class?

So I am a little critical about a lot of the assigned reading, sorry.

Anyways, we're meeting tomorrow to discuss the reading and learn our new tasks for the next few weeks. I don't think I had anymore to say, other than I wanted to post a picture I took of the recent snow fall here because it's pretty and I can. mwah hahahaha!

-C