weeks six and seven: beginning of the next portion of our experiment

Week six was rather uneventful, I spent most of my time cell counting and entering data into an excel sheet. I managed to finish counting all of the cell samples from June and some from May I am still not quite done with those but hopefully they will be done by the end of the summer. I also entered all the PAM (fluorescence) data from June I’m not sure if I’ll be doing the ones from May since there were some issues with those data sets, but I will be collecting the ones from the next part of the experiment. Also there was the weekly culture transfers and pH culture acclimation for the new experiment, the transfers where no issue the acclimation however was a bit of a hassle even though I enjoyed it, the cultures are so unpredictable you never know what they are going to do, the most notable example was when I was trying to adjust one from 7.48 to 7.7 and I added base and instead of going up like it was supposed to the pH went down a bit more ended up at 7.16, that incident frustrated me but I made it through it and the other days the acclimation went smoothly, all in all I feel like it was a productive week.

                Week seven went at a much faster pace with Rachel back and all, even though we had a few setbacks in setting up the experiment. Monday I was gone most of the day and the rest of it I spent entering more data. Tuesday I was unable to transfer the cultures because most of our pipettes where out for calibration and we didn’t get them back until Wednesday so the set up for our experiment was put on hold as well thankfully the pipettes we use for preparing slides for cell counts where still there so my time was mostly devoted to cell counts and entering data. Wednesday we where finally able to start the next part of our experiment, only instead of having only one pH treatment and a control this time we set up five treatments and the control this took most of the day and afternoon to set up. The next day other than my usual cell counts I helped Rachel with the fluorometry readings and the pH adjustments for all the replicates, this took us a long time and we finished after 6 for the first day. So for the eighth week things will be slower and we will have to work on time management so that our time points don’t take as long as they did on Thursday.