Research Experience for Community College Students in Critical Zone Science

July 17th, 2016

This week I determined if any of my plate and PMA samples had contaminants in them using my OTU table, determined if the effect of the resuscitation factors on the community composition had statistical significance, observed the diversity of different data subsets (plates, north-facing, south-facing, PMA samples, etc.), determined taxa that are significantly associated with the spore-selection treatment, determined taxa that are significantly associated with the VOC exposure, and made relative abundance figures comparing spore-forming bacteria to non-spore-forming bacteria. In this week’s communication workshop, I learned about authorship, acknowledgement, and writing a conclusion.

The biggest challenge continues to be working with R and RStudio. It takes me a long time to make an R script that works exactly as it should. I’m still trying to figure out how to interpret error messages and to fix syntax that is problematic. I also feel somewhat stressed because the amount of data I have to work with is very large. It’s difficult to filter it down to only what I need. Each question that I ask related to my project takes me several hours to answer when using R. I am definitely getting better with data processing, but it can certainly be overwhelming at times. I’ve been processing the data over the weekend so I can share some of my results for the June 18^th deadline.

I’ve learned that data processing takes a lot of patience. It’s great that my experiment resulted in a large data set, but this certainly amplifies the challenge and intensity that comes with processing it within a short time frame. I’ve noticed that it definitely helps to come up with specific questions and to break the data into subsets with less variables. It’s also helpful to notate any patterns I want to explore further and to write in my lab notebook where I left off in the analysis so I know where to start the next morning.

I’d say that the focus of my project has shifted to a component that I was not expecting: I originally thought that my project would discuss the effect of resuscitation factors on community composition, however; since the data shows that there were no statistically significant changes that resulted from the addition of resuscitation factors to culture plates, I’m having to analyze the data focusing more so on the differences in community composition as a result of extracting DNA directly from soil samples vs cultured plates, and the differences in spore-formers depending on location. These are both interesting topics, but much less conceptually stimulating. Trying to understand why resuscitation occurred would have been a very unique discussion for my presentation, but I still have an appreciation for my project. I feel as though I might be surprised at how people will respond to the concepts I present, regardless of the fact that bacterial physiology will not be a major subject matter.

One really encouraging instance that gave me a lot of pride in myself occurred at the end of the week. Tess told me that my project has been a rather intensive and challenging one and that I’ve caught on to everything in such a short period of time. It was definitely something that I needed to hear. The second half of this project has been very challenging for me and some days I feel flustered. For her to acknowledge and recognize that I’ve persevered through an overwhelming amount of new information meant a lot to me. I didn’t realize I was so capable of learning so much so quickly.