January 2nd, 2017 It has been 5 months since I wrote my last blog entry and since I completed the RECCS program. It is unbelievable how much this internship has positively impacted my life within such a short amount of time. I am grateful every day for the amazing summer that I had. It was… Read More
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… Read More
July 23rd, 2016 This week I finished up my data processing and finalized the figures for my poster and oral presentation, put together the rough draft of my project poster, and had a phone interview with science writer from CU Boulder to talk about my experience at RECCS. At the communication workshop, I participated in… Read More
July 10th, 2016 This week we worked on importing the primer plate barcode data into the RECCS mapping file using Rstudio, making an OTU table from the sequencing data using Unix, performing a Bray-Curtis and PCOA statistical analysis on all the plate data, and performing a Kruskal Wallis statistical analysis of the PMA samples data.… Read More
This week I scraped all of soil bacteria off of the agar plates, extracted DNA from the samples, prepped and put the gDNA samples through PCR, checked the PCR results using gel electrophoresis, put another set of gDNA samples through another round of PCR, combined all of the resulting amplicons and prepped them for sequencing,… Read More
June 26th, 2016 This week I extracted DNA from PMA treated soil solutions, ran two rounds of PCR for the PMA treated soil DNA and two rounds of gel electrophoresis, trained on using Unix and RStudio software, and trained on processing sequencing data. In the communication workshop I learned how to write and include the… Read More
June 14th, 2016 I am so exhausted after today! Since I live close by to campus I don’t typically drive so I can avoid parking fees. This week I’ve been trying a new practice: biking to the lab. I discovered that it has shaved off a lot of time in comparison to walking to campus.… Read More
June 13th, 2016 – Determining Proper Dilution for Plating and Preparing LB Agar Plates Today was a relatively fun day. The agar plates with various dilutions of soil bacteria from both the north-facing and south-facing slopes had incubated all weekend and thankfully had some growth on them. I was a bit surprised at how quickly… Read More
June 10th, 2016 Today was extremely fun! I learned that there’s a lot more to the process of transferring bacteria onto agar plates than simply just slopping some soil into PBS and then scooping an arbitrary amount up to dump onto the agar gel. It’s quite possible for too much bacteria to grow on a… Read More
June 9th, 2016 I showed up to the lab happy to find out that the peptidoglycan extraction hadn’t happened yet! I was excited that I would be able to see how to go from having a concentrated solution of bacteria cells to only having fragments of their peptidoglycan leftover. Although I was ecstatic for learning… Read More
