Research Experience for Community College Students in Critical Zone Science

June 7^th, 2016

Today I worked on creating 1/100 LB agar plates for the experiment. It consisted of weighing out solid compounds with a digital scale, washing agar powder using DI water and the magnetic stirrers, autoclaving the LB agar solution to sterilize it, letting it cool on the magnetic stirring plates, adding antifungals using a PR-1000 pipette, pouring the solution into plates under the flow hood, labelling the plates, and leaving them to solidify overnight. It surprised me how long this process took. It legitimately took me all day to prepare these plates. It was a fun process, regardless! I never thought I’d be able to prepare agar plates myself. They’ve always been prepared for me in previous lab courses and I never knew how they were made. I’m wondering if any of the procedures I’ve performed so far I’ll have the chance to repeat again. I think it would be good practice and would really help me memorize the technique.
Tess and I also formed a concentrated bacteria solution that we will later use for extracting peptidoglycan fragments. The bacteria started off in an Erlenmeyer flask labelled, “CLCC 646” which consisted of some kind of solvent and bacillus bacteria. In order to concentrate the bacteria into a small 50 mL plastic tube, we had to pipette them evenly into 6 plastic tubes for centrifuging using an automatic pipette tool. After centrifuging the CLCC 646, pellets formed at the bottom of the tubes making it easy to dump the supernatant off into the sink. We then resuspended the pellets in 1 mL of DI water using the PR-1000. I thought to myself how frustrated I’m going to feel going back to college lab courses after the summer. The tools I’m getting to use throughout the summer are far more convenient, accurate, and efficient than anything I’ve ever used in other labs. I’m certainly going to miss the ease of use!

I’m looking forward to seeing how we will extract the peptidoglycan fragments from a whole bunch of concentrated cells. Tomorrow I will be touring NOAA, so I’ll likely have to wait until Thursday.