After a long day of research, we stumbled upon this farmers market in the Greenbriar parking lot. We ordered the honey, lemon, mint tea with rosemary and we were revitalized to research another week. There are so many items to choose from and everyone is so friendly. This bag of mixed nuts helped me through the week as well. Get out and make your heart healthy and power up!

This last week was very data heavy.  We decided to run four samples instead of two. Not only that but we also started reducing the amount of current we were applying to our cultures. We noticed that when we cut it in half after a minute all the biofilm was removed. So we cut that in half and we noticed that after about five minutes all the biofilm was removed. This is important because the less electricity that’s required the cheaper it is to use this method of cleaning membranes. My mentor is being Assigned to a different research project and as a result I am taking over this current project for my remaining time. This is awesome and scary at the same time since we are now sharing our measurement device with another group. Our cultures are required to stay in one place and not be moved at all and that’s going to be very hard when we have another group that wants to use the device that we store them on.

Hi everyone!

I hope y’all had a great and restful Fourth of July!

Last week, I helped Professor Huang with our phage isolation process. What this means is that we were able to successful with our bacteriophages!  We have found phages that are able to remove the bacteria and inhibit bacteria growth completely.

Now, we will try to find the best type of phage size and/or phage combination.

Good morning,

Nothing new to report. Our experiment has finished running and we managed to get the contact angles for after the experiment. We also need to get the roughness test done and look at the samples under the SEM, but my mentor didnt book a time so they were both in use last week. Hopefully we will manage to get some of that data today. In addition, the RICE people are learning how to make their whiteboard video today so that should be super exciting! Hope everyone had a great and safe July 4th.

It was another long week of programming.  As with any programming experience, it has its ups and downs.   By the end of the week, I was able to track a pulse through the camera using a finger with a phone light behind it.  The signal is still very noisy and I have been trying (not successfully) to run a filter on the data to clean it up.

As you can see below, the signal allows me to get the photoplesmogram (ppg) .  From this i can calculate the time between beats and then generate the pulse rate.

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!

Well for a short week it has been busy.  We cultured two bacteria, one gram positive the other gram negative. We added LACDF and DACDF to them, a fluorescent tag.  We cultivated them, washed them, and make samples of them to image.  Using the Nikon confocal, the L 700 laser was down, we scanned them to review next week and put the results in the poster.  Happy 4th RET’s!

I certainly did have a blast last week visiting and learning about more detailed information regarding my fellow colleague’s research labs. It was nice to get out of my lab and to receive a glimpse of how hard others are working on their projects. Keep up the good job guys! 2 more weeks! The BRC labs were my favorite, because they were very tidy and quite relative to my teaching field. I also, had a great time visiting the Sugar Land Water Treatment plant. It was quite interesting  that this plant is still fairly new and recently was completed in 2014. This water treatment  plant  provides residents a water blend ratio of 30% surface to 70% groundwater. Majority of the plant utilizes surface water from nearby Oyster Creek, an offshoot of the Brazos River, to produce nine million gallons of potable water per day. The Sugar Land Water Treatment Plant  is the largest capital improvement project ever for the City.It was nice to know that there are  Sugar Lang Groundwater Reduction Programs available, such as the “Learning to be WaterWise” water conservation education program.  The program involves the education of fourth or fifth grade students in the need for water conservation, by providing student and teacher educational materials and a water conservation kit at no cost to the school or student. Finally, it was awesome to see and learn about the different filter sizes/membranes that are used in the process of treating  water.

I don’t really have much to update on this week.

This week we tested four cells at the same time. We reduced the mA from our previous tests. The graphs on the left are with a 25mA current applied and after the first 2 minutes all biofouling had been removed which was really great. The 2 on the left we dropped the mA to 12.5 and saw that it only marginally effected  the amount of time required to remove all of the biofouling. We are planning on creating additional cells and finding out how low we can drop the mA before biofouling is no longer removed. for each graph there are roughly 12 sets of data with 17 data points per that are averaged together and then normalized.

The city of Sugar Land’s surface water treatment plant began delivering water to Sugar Land customers in November 2013. The water produced by the plant originates from the Brazos River. The Plant can deliver 9 million gallons of water per day. Sugar Land’s water is treated to meet very high standards. Strict attention to quality assurance has resulted in a superior product that surpasses all federal state drinking water standards.