I have to leave right now, so I’ll post some methods later, but here is some incoherent data for you all to digest. This is done in DI water in regular LB broth.
And here is the data via Google Docs:
E. coli growth
Category Archives: DDW Effects On Life
Please critique my #SciFund proposal
Yeast Day 2
These are the results of the “experiments” we did yesterday and Tuesday. The difference between the samples is that the cultures from Tuesday were streaked from a colony on another plate whereas the cultures that grew last night were streaked from liquid media. So it seems this yeast doesn’t grow so well from a single colony on agar. Further evidence to prove that I should just get a more common strain.
Yeast and E. coli Day 2
First off, how come yeast has a common name but E. coli doesn’t? Can we call it shitus?
Anyways yesterday Alex and I did some follow up work after starting some cultures. She did a good job notebooking the experience so I won’t double up on her thoughts. Check that out here.
We took some pictures of the e.coli and the yeast which turned out pretty bad. I’ll have to try and take some better images today or something. In general though it looks like the yeast we have isn’t what we thought it was. It may not be a mutant of S. cerevisiae but may be some version of Schizosaccaramyces pombe (I hope I spelled that right, I like the first name a lot) because it looked nothing like budding yeast.
The result of this is that I will be ordering some new yeast straight up from atcc.org that is of some variety that I commented on in Alex’s notebook (hopefully).
My #SciFund Proposal (a work in progress)
I just wanted to get this up today. Here is my #SciFund proposal on Google Docs. It is publicly open for comments. I won’t have a rough draft done until later today or early tomorrow so be sure to check back frequently. But in the spirit of open notebook science, I figured everyone deserves a chance to see the evolution in real time.
E. Coli and Yeast Incubation
I’m showing Alex some sterile technique and how to inoculate yeast and e. coli via liquid media and solid (agar) media.
Today we plucked a few colonies of yeast from our starter batch (which may need to be replenished soon) and streaked the cells onto some YPD plates. One plate is in an incubator/shaker at 24C and the other is sitting at RT. We also inoculated a colony in 10mL of YPD.
For the E. coli, we did essentially the same thing, but we are doing 1 plate of LB media (agar) and 1 10mL test tube of LB broth.
Tomorrow we will try for some OD readings, and then we will try to setup time point growth experiments. It should be noted this is all in regular H2O. Right now I want Alex to get familiar with the process and then we will start doing some DDW and D2O studies probably in a couple of weeks.
#SciFund Challenge Accepted!
If you watch “How I Met Your Mother” you’ll get the title of this post. But if you don’t then I’ll let it be known that I have just completed my submission for the second #SciFund challenge which is hosted by RocketHub.com. Here is my submission:
DDW5: Water Day 25 (Delayed)
I took these pictures on Day 25, but haven’t had time to post them because of all the SDM work. So here they are:
One more set of pictures to take.
Cool videos from looking at lichen sample
Here are a few videos that I made yesterday that I tried uploading to BenchFly but am having issues with my account so I refrained. I uploaded one to Youtube and the other two I just put here for you to download. One video is almost 2 GB so I’m leaving that in the closed science regime until I can get the kinks with BenchFly worked out.
The youtube video is of a dead insect (with wings) that was floating in the sample. I looked around the “fly” for a while and noticed a swarm of microbes in the area highlighted in the video. Use fullscreen to see it better. I have no idea what the microbes are doing, but there are tons of them.
The other two videos are of a microbe moving itself around the sample. I noticed that whatever the organism uses for motility has quite a large reach. You can see it in the videos, local environment particles will be perturbed in the direction of the microbe as the microbe moves toward those particles. Whatever the microbe is using for motility is not visualized in the movie, however. These two videos will need to be downloaded to your local machine (right click -> “save link as”), unless WP added some sort of streaming option to uploaded videos.
Looking for tardigrades setup
I didn’t get a chance to go in to lab this weekend so I couldn’t get my notes, so I’m doing it now. I posted all my results from looking under the scope on Friday evening here. Side note: I looked at the sample again today and everything was still busting with life. No tardigrades, but I got some cool videos which I’m posting to BenchFly (I’ll post in my notebook when they’re up).
Onto the notes…
Out of all the samples one had some mold on it so I threw it out. It was the sample with the mystery fungus. Ok now let’s move onto my method:
- When we first gathered the samples, I added water to the dry samples. The lichen sample got about 10mL of DI water and was allowed to soak for a few days.
- I filled 3 analyslides (see Experiments’ product list link above), each with 6mL of DI water.
- I would use a pair of tweezers to grab a chunk of lichen from the original sample and place it in an analyslide. With the tweezers I would shake the lichen sample for about 1 minute. This would break the lichen into much smaller chunks which should release the water bears from their shelter/slumber.
- In the lab we have an Olympus IX71 inverted microscope and I used a 20x objective to visualize the samples.
- I ended up checking 2 of the 3 samples I prepared, and saw nothing but lichen chunks in there. Eventually I looked at the original petri dish sample and got all the cool results that I mentioned earlier.