Hi everyone! Hope you had an enjoyable 4th of July.
The last couple weeks have been especially busy. During week #4 of my research, I created treatments and incubated them in microcosms (2-L carboys) at room temperature. As I collected all the necessary subsamples, I began making slides from the frozen cryo vials. I also pooled the triplicates, or three replicates, of my treatments onto 0.22 micron nitrocellulose filters to capture bacteria, after which I stored the filters in the -80 ºC freezer (which is extremely cold!). I will use these filters later when I conduct t-RFLP (terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism) to assess changes in bacterial community composition. Lastly, I helped Professor Williamson prepare vials with sub-samples from each of my treatments so they could be analyzed for bacterial production via tritiated leucine assays. Since tritiated leucine is radioactive and I am not certified to handle such substances, Professor Williamson was primarily responsible for this part of the project.
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