{"id":388,"date":"2016-06-15T16:48:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T22:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/?p=388"},"modified":"2016-06-15T18:23:15","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T00:23:15","slug":"preparing-pbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/2016\/06\/15\/preparing-pbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparing PBS"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 6th<\/sup>, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today was a relatively painless and enjoyable day for me, though I confess I did have an awkward new-intern moment! My mentor, Tess, emailed me that I could come in for my first day whenever I wanted and that she\u2019d be in the lab at around 8:30 AM. Naturally, being the night owl that I am, I slept in until 8:00 AM or so and didn\u2019t get to the CIRES building until abou\"Phosphate-Buffered<\/a>t 10:00 AM. I quickly discovered that it was not particularly intuitive to navigate around the building so it took me awhile to find the lab and offices. Once I finally located it, I couldn\u2019t find my mentors. I found someone in a nearby office and he kindly let me utilize his laptop to check my email. Tess had emailed me last second that there was a lab meeting at 10:00 AM on the third floor. I quickly found the room and grabbed a seat to view the presentation. I was a little embarrassed that I was late, but I managed to only be 10 minutes late and determined I could have done much worse than I did. Tess introduced me to the team after the presentation and they were all understanding. I found it amusing that this circumstance happened to me on my first day, being that just this morning I Googled, \u201cHow to make the most out of your internship\u201d and read about being timely. I\u2019m certainly going to make sure that doesn\u2019t happen again.<\/p>\n

Tess showed me around the lab which reminded me of a glorified chemistry lab. There was a lot of machinery I wasn\u2019t familiar with and I was excited at the prospect of eventually knowing my way around and bettering my laboratory technique skills. Tess went over the project with me, which I was especially grateful for. The previous week we had simply speculated about the project topic, so I was glad that this time she had a clear\"First<\/a> idea of how our experiment would play out. I made sure to ask for clarification on any concept or procedure I didn\u2019t understand. I found that I was learning useful scientific content as well as the applications of such. Our goal for the day was to make phosphate buffer saline (PBS), a buffer that will be used to dilute soil samples we\u2019ll be collecting later in the week. I really enjoyed this process. It took me back to my chemistry lab courses I\u2019ve taken in college. We searched a recipe for PBS and obtained the necessary compounds. I weighed out the compounds using a digital scale, mixed them in a beaker, dissolved the compounds in deionized water using a magnetic stirrer, adjusted the pH of the solution using a pH measuring device and probe, diluted the solution to 1L, and then ran it through a cycle on the autoclave machine. Tess was fantastic about providing me with the necessary information I needed to complete each of these steps and she let me perform all of them by myself or with only some assistance. I can tell this is a great way to learn some of these techniques.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we will be making a 1\/100 LB medium. I\u2019m definitely looking forward to it. I had a lot of fun making the PBS and I imagine making the medium will be just as interesting and enjoyable!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 6th, 2016 Today was a relatively painless and enjoyable day for me, though I confess I did have an awkward new-intern moment! My mentor, Tess, emailed me that I could come in for my first day whenever I wanted and that she\u2019d be in the lab at around 8:30 AM. Naturally, being the night… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reccs-2016"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 06:18:56","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/reccs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}