Week 6.

29 July 16

On Monday we visited the hydroelectric Bonneville Dam. Coming from an arid environment, it was amazing to see and feel the power of the Columbia below my feet. The Columbia River makes the rivers back home look like creeks. I saw many fish, but the most interesting was the lamprey, with its sucking teeth-filled mouth. Throughout the week we continued to work on the nepholometer gas vesicle collapse measurements. We are still manipulating factors and tweaking the protocol. We changed the vesicle isolation protocol from centrifugation to filtration and added a wider range of pressure that could reach 200 psi. Our results show that there are differences between samples treated with BMAA and the control. This is exciting!

We decided to take a break from the BMAA detection. I'm sure we will pick it up soon. The nepholometer measurements are lot more fun to conduct anyways.