Post Spring Break #1
Spring Break ended and I was stressed. I still had to choose what school I wanted to go to and figure out what do with my experiment.
One Tuesday, April 9, I started my experiment. I talked to Andrew Lerario and gathered supplies to use the homogenizer. Larissa was my "spotter," in case anything were to go wrong. Andrew told me that the glass could shatter and that we needed thick working gloves etc. etc, but nothing happened. The homogenizer blade ended up tangled up in the sea grass and it didn't do anything. Then Larissa and I searched up a youtube video of normal grass homogenization and realized that we had to the cut the sea grass into smaller chunks. Then we tried. We messed around with all the settings. The homogenizer would heat up and smell terrible (like rubber burning). At that point, we decided that it would be better to either use better/new blades or borrow a blender. I didn't have enough sample to use a blender so I had to wait to get more supplies.
On April 18, I blended up the sea grass from the la jolla area using Andrew's Ninja.
On April 19,
Morning: I talked to Jesse and we decided that it might be best to just use a 0.02 um filter (so that bacteria and anything bigger doesn't influence the data) and see what happens. I used sterile technique (basically in the hood and ethanol sprayed everything). I then helped Larissa with her project (water quality testing).
In the afternoon, I started making the mueller hinton agar. Jeff kindly autoclaved it for me. The agar blew up in Kalle's microwave (I cleaned it though). Sadly the one dish thing I made before autoclaving didn't turn solidfy. Jesse thinks it was because the water to agar ratio was correct, but luckily the next morning, when I went to Jeff's the agar was solid so I think the part that I poured was mostly water.
April 20
I made agar plates in Jesse's cell culture hood and helped Larissa with her experiment
Till Exhibition night I basically just did my experiment stuff in the morning and helped Larissa after my stuff. Then in the afternoon, I would just research or work on exhibition related stuff. I'm having trouble with E. Coli.
My video will be uploaded soon:
Link to my presentation:
LInk to final procedure with everything explained:
