What a whirlwind this has been!! Are we already on Week 4?! Is it ONLY two weeks left?!!? Where has the time gone??

Anyway, my week 3 is relatively short! I unfortunately got sick and had to stay home for a few days out of the week, BUT I definitely got the inside scoop of what I missed (and also couldn’t miss out: the water treatment plant!).

As for what I missed in the lab: when I came back, we prepared samples for cultures to plate this week! This is great news, as this means our SEM images are GREAT and we are getting more results. The phages are attaching to the bacteria appropriately and they are being loaded correctly! We are going to now adjust the phage size and see if we can “fish” these little guys out before my internship ends!

In this collage, I took a picture of the filters/membranes that they have! I thought this was pretty cool because I never really saw the filter as a “big picture” kind of thing! The different “hair” size are for input/output and to help filter the water better.

The picture with all the different faucets is how they obtain sample water from various sources (ponds, lakes, sewage) and directly below, is their nice, pretty lab where they test for water purity.

We got to see the actual plant afterwards (the last row), with the massive cell membrane tubes, different pipes/valves, as well as the plant itself. This was my first time ever going to a water treatment plant, so the whole thing was pretty neat! I did not realize the many, many components that went into cleaning a large amount of water.