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Finishing one project to start another

During the seventh week of the program, I discovered that the pHstat system reagent flow rate might be dependent upon the height of the reagent bags above the manifold. In order to discover the range that the manifold maintained similar perturbation times, I experimented with the height of the reagents increasing it an inch at a time until the system could no longer compensate. I tested two different concentrations at the 0.25 pH deviation, this was due to this deviation resulting in the greatest difference in perturbation from the data. This allowed us to discover the height range where the perturbation rate remained similar to the collected results of the data and allowed us to better assess the relationship of the data. The experiments lasted till the end of the week where I made even more media for future experiments.

Then during the eighth week we began testing the liquid manifold again. We started testing the liquid manifold with a growing culture over a 24 hour period. The major problem so far has been with data collection, and we believed the problem was mostly fixed after some alterations. So we began the experiment on Monday. On Tuesday of this week I went to Astoria for a trip during the internship and was not present in the lab during this time. After two days we finally attained the 24 hour biotic experiment data for the liquid manifold. After we assessed this data, we replaced the liquid manifold for the gas manifold to test the pH perturbation using CO2 gas and compressed air. The CO2 gas directed the pH of the abiotic media in an acidic direction, where the compressed air was used to direct the pH towards an alkaline direction. After we gathered this data, I transferred the cultures that needed new media. Next week we should be starting the preparations for the overall experiment. I am excited to be learning even more and helping in the set-up of the experiment!