Blogs

This week, I ran the solar simulator for the photodegradation experiment for the first time. All of my preparations from the past 5 week lead up to when I turned the instrument on Wednesday. It was much warmed than I expected, the temperature of my sample initially increased in temperature, but soon stabilized during the trial with the MillQ. Samples were taken at 2 hour intervals after the first hour, and due to the apparent stabilization in temperature, an overnight, 15 hour trial was conducted the next day, to test the long term effects of photodegradation on metformin.

Through these past few weeks, I have been exploring my knowledge (with a ton of troubleshooting) of R studio and big data analysis.  

I am currently working with Tawnya Peterson to help her prepare her current research paper of M. bacteria growth and it's link to chlorophyll.  Over the past several weeks I have been learning how to strip the data off the web, and analyze a year's worth of data.  

This week got off to a fun start when I joined the other IEH interns on a field trip to the gorge. It was a beautiful sunny day which was perfect weather for viewing waterfalls. One of my favorite parts turned out to be the tour of Bonneville Dam. My previous knowledge of hydroelectric power was basically what I remembered from grade school, which was barely anything, so I learned a lot from the tour. I learned about the history of the dam, how fish ladders work, how the turbines work, and perhaps most importantly, that I really do not want to work as a fish counter for a dam.

          In the lab this week I prepared more competent cells and cultured some more Mnx overexpressing cultures. I also did one last check on the Gibson assembly plasmids containing the Mnx full complex with a His-tag using an enzyme digest. The results looked promising and suggested that the assembly was successful! We will know for sure next week when the sequencing results come back.

29 July 16

This week was spent growing up massive E. coli cultures for cell harvest, which will eventually be used for more Mnx protein purification. This process of making competent cells to transform with the pASK vector that contains either a full manganese oxidation complex (MnxDG) or a partial complex (MnxEF), then growing the cells up, harvesting them at the optimal time for protein expression, then purifying the protein is long and complex. You need to pay close attention at every stage of culture growth because man do these babies grow up fast. The doubling time of E.

This week I worked on preparing plasmids containing MnxG and SOD(2) for sequencing from the TOPO clones we prepared last week. The sequencing data will be analyzed and used to confirm the presence of these genes so that the other interns can use those plasmids to investigate the effects of these proteins and others such as catalase and Oxy on thermal and oxidative stress response.

This week, further preliminary experiments for the solar simulator have been conducted. Originally, the intention was to use an open circulating water bath to keep the temperature constant. However, after a few leaks and spills, a closed water bath will be used, with copper tubing to transmit the difference in temperature. So far, the temperature of the bath seems to be fairly constant but the bath has not been run for long enough periods of time to be able to conclusively identify the effectiveness of this technique.

Finished week seven continue working with my PHP script from last week, and by doing that I had more command functions to final__params.php. Charles had me add in function() and argument check to php script to make sure that the script is gathering data from the database server. 

From there I created a test file to print out the results from my PHP scripts, and by doing that I made ./test.bat. With this test file it has all the functions like the: variable, assetype, asset, request, station, and offering from final__params.php.