Week 6: Continuing the Experiment

At the beginning of the week I was once again waiting to continue my project in some way. I continued to do more acid washing and maintenance work in the lab. Due to Rachel’s work in the radiation room, I even refreshed the batch cultures for further experimentation. Since I did not have much to do this week, I helped out with a different research project at Portland State University on Wednesday. I helped out by counting the amount of germinated seedlings in each pot and removing them so that even more seedlings can germinate in the future. This project has to do with a correlation of salinity and germination rate. This activity took most of the morning and it was great to see a different type of research within the Portland State University greenhouse. When I returned to OHSU for the afternoon I learned that the project was changing once again. All of the data that I had previously collected was no longer usable for the biotic experimentation, so I began preparations for my change in project.

On Thursday I started a new liquid manifold 24 hour biotic run using the pH set point Labview program. Unlike the other runs that I had collected before, this run included extra measurements at specific time points to assess more than just the pH changes occurring within the culture over a 24 hour light and dark cycle. I prepared the vacuum tubes with the acid for the continual DIC testing of the culture. This first run included samples for DIC and chlorophyll to observe the carbonate chemistry of the culture and if the chemistry is affected by the amount of growth of the culture. The experiment ended on Friday, then the data from the run was processed. The pH drift of the pH meter was also recorded and the pH meter was calibrated to see the amount of pH drift over the period of the weekend. This change in routine was interesting and added more steps to look after during a 24 hour run. These points were time sensitive so I needed to learn how to rush for the sampling points to gather all of the data needed.