Week 4 Fall 2018: Good Luck Kassy!

Kassy is on her way to Maryland to present at the WAESO conference as I type. I am so proud of her. She has worked so hard and I know she will represent the team very well. Ibrahim will also be there to represent, so it's nice to know we will be presenting twice. Good luck to everyone going! (Sam and Daisy too) Today Amanda and I will be holding down the fort here. We are taking our Psedomonas aeruginosa plastic #3 7-28 day co-incubated samples to look for surface biodegredation. I am so excited to possibly see visual differences from each time interval.

Week 3 Fall 2018: Getting Older

This week has been a little slow. Kassy and I had a mock presentation this week with Dr. Cotter and Amanda as our audience. It was nice to go over everything again since we have not presented in  several months. Another thing is that I have been alcohol treating our plastic number 4. I did the treatment on Friday and it has still not fully evaporated. I expect that it will be dry in the hood sometime tomorrow. The highlight of the week is the fact that today is my birthday! Although that does not mean anything crazy is going to happen. I think well go out to dinner which makes me so happy, and I will be getting an new phone tomorrow. Which is kind of curse because I do not which phone I want. I am loyal to Samsung but I am so tempted to get an Iphone. Help me out guys give me your best advice and reviews. Thanks in advance.                                   

Week 2 Fall 2018: SEM Day

This image was taken from the Phoenix College website

So today was very productive, all three of us went to the SEM in the newly remodeled C building. Dr Hamdan helped us and walked us through the methods for using the SEM correctly. It was a challenge to get very clear images, especially on the rougher surfaced microplastics. Unfortunately Kassandra and I had to leave before all the images were taken due to our class schedules but luckily Amanda was able to stay and finish. I am so glad that we will be going back because I definitely need more time with the machine and the techniques. (For those that do not know SEM stands for Scanning Electron Microscope.) Although I do not feel like I had enough time with the SEM today, I am excited to be able to grasp and understand the whole process so much better. I can feel more confident when presenting our research going forward now that I will have first hand experience with the protocols, equipment, and images.

Week 1 Fall 2018: Hard Lessons Learned

It's the first full week and Dr. Cotter instructed us to organize and clean the - 80° freezer. Oh wait a bit of new information: we have our new team member! Amanda! She is doing great so far and has lots of questions about the research. I can tell she is very eager to contribute. Ok now back to explaining the lessons learned. So me and Kassy were going through our samples and found that some of the tape that was used to label the bags our coincubated tubes were in froze off! We then checked our tubes to determine the dates the samples were processed and discovered they were not properly labeled. We were instantly shock and confused. So much stress ensued as we struggled to try and figure out what tubes were part of which week. Finally Wednesday we removed all our samples and were able to definitively determine the dates for a majority of the samples and so we can move on with the next phase of the project and analyze these microplastics! Phew! Always properly label everything my friends! (Photo is of fridge not freezer, I was not able to get a photo in time for this post. Photo credit to Josh)