I had some thoughts about what I wanted to do next. Now I can’t quite remember what I wanted to jot down (which was the point of this post to begin with) so I’m going to ramble a little until I remember.

The first thing that I wanted to write down was an experiment that Steve and I have talked about a couple of times with regards to the Repeating Crumley Experiments. It seems like the fastest growing plants seem to be right around 1% D2O in DDW (what Molarity would that be? My brain ceases to function right now…). So we want to expand on this a little bit and do small concentrations of D2O in DDW compared to DDW and DI water (with a simulated DI water content sample too) and see if we can find some maximal amount of D2O content for tobacco seed growth.

Since our hypothesis is that life has evolved a use for deuterium (like it has other trace molecules), this should really provide a result and highlight some data that is missing from our current experiments. By this I mean that I have 1ppm deuterium in water (DDW), 156ppm D in water (DI-ish), and whatever ppm 33%, 66%, and 99% are in water (the other D2O) samples. That means there is a major disconnect between the low deuterium content stuff and the high. So this experiment will attempt to fill in the gap. I’ll have to come up with a name for this experiment.

Now that I’ve rambled a bit, I actually remember what the second experiment I wanted to jot down was. Talking with a professor, I explained my results about the root hairs and the seed germination stuff and he found it pretty interesting. Being a physics professor he had no biological intuition about what could be happening, but he did wonder about what could be going on physically. In talking with a fellow grad student I learned about photobleaching experiments that reveal diffusion parameters for a solution. By photobleaching some fluorescent molecules you can watch new fluorescent molecules diffuse into the viewing area, time it, do some simple math, and then get your information.

I’d like to apply this to our water experiments to gain some potential insight about the diffusion of molecules in  D2O, DDW, DI water, and various mixtures of those. I’m guessing it’ll be pretty hard to measure this and so I’m thinking of doing agarose gels to slow down diffusion, or maybe adding some other type of viscous material. In either case, it’s not a fully formed plan, but something to consider in the near term.