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