Snow: round 5,000

The snow continues to fall in Worcester. But life must go on.

 

Classes have been canceled left and right here on campus, but for the most part I've had every single class thus far. However, that stream came to an awkward close today, when my professor goofed and forgot to attach the class e-mail list when e-mailing us that class was canceled (only one student got the e-mail). No one ended up coming to Conservation Biology, the class I'm auditing, either. Come 2:00, both of my classes were "done" for the day, but I had yet to get any real work done, which was kind of a bummer. I guess next freak storm we have I'll know better to just assume that even I can have classes canceled, and to just to go the library instead.

On Monday I finished making stock solutions for my diatom media. As opposed to a lot of bacteria which can grow off of plain LB broth, I had to make a special media with a specific balance of chemicals to support diatom growth. For the most part, I mixed minute volumes of powders to tubes of water, a total of 10 different solutions. I took only 0.5-1% of each solution and added it to a solution of artificial seawater (water and salts). This solution was then autoclaved separately from an agar solution. When combined, the seawater and agar solution made solidified diatom seawater agar plates, upon which I can grow my diatoms. I'll use these to transform my diatoms on in the near future.

I chronicled these recent efforts in the YouTube post below (be sure to check it out, because there's a really cool bonus video at the end which may or may not include a hawk eating a squirrel).



I hope to continue my forward lab momentum and start spreading diatom cells on my plates soon to let them grow up. From there I hope it's setting up a meeting with some lab folks down in RI about transforming some diatoms. Hey! This project is about to take off!

Outside of the lab, I'm trying to stay on track in Topics in Marine Biology (reading and annotating scientific literature), Ecology (trying to remember how Excel works in order to analyze data) and Animal Behavior (where I hope to start our research projects soon with Three-spined Stickleback). I also need to keep the motion going with ROCU, Clark's radio program which I run with a few of my friends. Today's only Wednesday, which leaves me with a long day of classes on Thursday and a day to catch up in lab and work on Friday before the weekend. Cheers for now!

LOL let's just like spend the afternoon measuring out reagents and adding them to water. Sounds like MY idea of a great time!

Okay, okay, it wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be, but measuring out stuff on scales and adding them to tubes and such wasn't how I was planning on spending my afternoon!

Let me actually jump back to the beginning and tell you WHY I was measuring out "stuff" on scales and such. It's come to the point in my project where I need to be growing diatom cultures on agar plates (like I do with bacteria), but first I need to make very specific media to grow them on. The agar media is mixed with a very specific balance of vital minerals and such, and because the ratios were different than our lab usually uses, my professor and I decided it was best that I just start from scratch.

 

I made several different reagents today, of which I'm going to use 1 milliliter of each later when I make the agar media. Yeah, that's way less than an ounce.

In any case, I should run along and catch up on some other work I was meaning to do before I got caught up in lab!