Presenting my Data (Week 4)

The highlight of this week was preparing a presentation to give on Wednesday to the other interns and their mentors. The biggest challenge was designing a presentation that I could get through in less than 5 minutes. Despite my doubts, I actually had a lot of fun designing my presentation, which went through several drafts as I got a better idea of what I should say.

The timing of the presentation was perfect, because I had just gotten some preliminary data that I had been working on for a while. For the past couple of weeks, I was working on extracting and amplifying the DNA from some cave samples, but I was running into several problems. However, on Monday, I finally suceeded in getting a good amplification of almost all of my samples. So, this data came just in time to include in my presentation.

I did quite a bit of culturing this week that did not have to do with my Antartica project. I cultured some deep-sea bacteria samples. Also,  I collected some soil from a stump in order to try to culture a bacteria that oxidizes manganese and breaks down lignin. Rick and I designed some media in order to culture the microbes from the stump. This media had all the basic nutrients, as well as some lignin and manganese. I also plated these samples on two other types of plates (Lept and Mfresh). So far, several colonies have grown on the Lept plates and I have begun isolating them. I haven't had any sucess with the other plates yet, but hopefully the weekend will give them enough time to grow. 

Near the end of the week, I been working on some new primers that need to be optimized before I use them. They were dry, so first I suspended them in a Tris/EDTA solution. Today, I did a PCR to test the primers. The bacterial and fungal primers did just fine, but the Archaea samples didn't amplify anything. I'm not sure if that's because there isn't enough Archaeal DNA in the sample or because there was some problem with the primers. I did another PCR with just the Archaea primers, using another DNA sample. I haven't done a gel with that PCR yet, so I don't know if it amplified or not, but I am hoping that it did.