Wednesday was my last official day in the lab, so we made it a 10 hour day! Being an RET was a fantastic opportunity. Thanks NEWT Center and Mariana Lopes Lanzarini, my mentor. Feeling a little verklempt! Oh, it finally worked!!!
All posts by Michelle Landreville
Bacteria Never Sleep!
I went to the lab for a couple of hours on July 4th and today in order to check on our flow through reactor and take images with the OCT (optical coherence tomography) microscope. We are still seeking the elusive biofilm!!
The current cell flow through reactor has test sample substrates since our original substrate didn’t produce biofilm. We upped the level of glucose in the NSF drinking water standard and added 1% LB. The petri dish shows growth from the waste water output after travelling through the flow cell reactor.
If bacteria are ubiquitous and many water treatment systems are fouled by biofilms, why won’t any grow on our $(#*@ substrates??
The optical fibers are tested and ready to go… but, we have to grow it before we can kill it…
On a positive note, I peed for science!
Hope it works!
Ah, the joy and frustration of original ideas. Below you can see video of our test run. The quote for our cell flow through reactor was $600, but my mentor worked with an in-house engineer to fabricate it for $70- DIY! Still waiting to see if we produced an actual biofilm.
Week 2… Spent with my students at conference!
I got to spend just one day in the lab last week(shadowing Elliot and his mentor) before leaving at 5am Tuesday morning until Sunday night. Fourteen of my students competed at the HOSA- Future Health Professionals conference in Orlando, FL with 9,750 students representing 54 states and countries. Our biggest memory was when the US Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Dr. Jerome Adams MD MPH, photo-bombed our group photo!
An exercise in patience and perseverance
My mentor is away at a conference, so she left prep work for me to complete. This includes cutting, stripping, and polishing both ends of a 1 mm thick, 15 cm long optical fiber, with a goal of 8 working fibers. Do you know how fragile a 1 mm fiber of glass is? This blog could also be titled,”Science brought to you by the number 8″. Polishing a fiber consists of mounting it to a polishing disk and using a series of 5 nanoscale sandpapers in order. You must make 80 figure 8’s on each sandpaper. And yes, it is possible to suddenly forget how to draw an 8! I was able to complete 10 fibers in 2 days.
And so we begin!
Super excited to begin the RET process at Rice University on this rainy Wednesday. Not as excited about our soggy trek through the rain this morning, though 🙁 Can’t wait to see how everyone’s research turns out when we meet again in July! Good luck everyone. Now let’s science!!!!