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Week 9 - Creating My Poster

It’s crazy how fast my time at this internship has gone. Everything is wrapping up now. I spent most of the week preparing my research poster since I was presenting to my lab group in our meeting on Friday. I’ve never made a research poster before so I was a bit confused at first. Once Rachel helped me get started I began to enjoy the chance to get creative. The lab meeting was an opportunity to practice what I would say, and to get feedback on my poster. I got a lot of great comments on it, so I’m feeling confident that I’ll be ready to present next Friday to more people.

Preparing for presentations

This week I started to make a posterboard for the last day of this internship. It was a little bit tricky to figure out how to make a posterboard on Powerpoint, but, once you get the hang of it, it is not so bad. It was also difficult to decide what to put on the board, since I have a lot of data. I asked the lead scientist on what I should do, and he just told me to make it interesting and to direct it toward the audience that will see my posterboard. Besides that, I have been doing second runs of the same compounds, to test for reproducibility. 

End of research is in sight

With over 20 different compounds analyzed via cyclic voltammetry, I would say that data collection for this entire project is about complete. It seems that over the span of this internship, I have collected enough data for a publcation or so. At the end of the week, we had the pleasure of going on a field trip to astoria to see what it is like to be a field researcher. The environment is entirely different than in a lab setting, and I can see how people can become drawn to the idea of doing science in nature. 

week 8.

12 August 16

Winding down and field trip

On Monday, we finally spiked our new phytoplankton cultures for the isotope uptake experiment. Coulter counter, fluorometer and PAM fluorometer measurements were taken before inoculation and at the conclusion of each time trial. It was great learning how to use all of these different instruments. The first day of the time series, we noticed the settings of the PAM were different from when we ran the original experiments. Having started the uptake experiment already, we decided to leave the settings until after this experiment was over to keep consistent data.

Week 8 - pHstat Experiments

The bulk of this week was spent gathering data from the pHstat. Since the experiment last Friday went well, Rachel decided to start a pH gradient experiment. For this kind of experiment, the computer generates a sine curve that has an amplitude and frequency that we set. The experiment is supposed to reproduce the natural pH cycle present in the ocean due to changing carbon dioxide levels throughout the day. When the sun is out and the phytoplankton are performing photosynthesis, the carbon dioxide decreases, so the pH decreases.

Week 7 - Flow Cytometry Failure

Once again, I worked on many different projects this week. Every day I come in I never know what I’ll be working on since Rachel and I have so many different experiments we want to run. On Monday and Tuesday I mostly worked with the flow cytometer. I made a new calibration curve for T. weiss to compare to the old one, and it was very different. The slope for one line was positive and the other one was negative. I ran a test with randomly made buffers to see which line would be more accurate but they were both terrible. The second one I made was off, but the first line was extremely off.

week. 7

05 August 16

Week 7 Blog Update Katherine Lothrop

This week I did a pretty simple z-score analysis over the Phyco graphs I finally got working last week for the year 2012, and pulled together the chlorphyll graphs for different depths/years to compare with Phyco.  Curently working on smoothing the data (take the acerage for an hour, then plot the hour averages, etc.) 

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