Week 13

Nine hours a week seems like so few sometimes. I often feel the week has flown by and little progress is being made. Then, surprisingly, we're at the end of the semester, I have at least some results, my poster is nearly done and finals are just around the corner. Its surreal that life moves forward in these little bursts of activity. 

Anyway this week in lab I worked on my poster for the Estrella Mountain Conference that is rapidly approaching. It seems to be coming together quite well. It took awhile to find a layout that I liked but once I did it has been smooth sailing. I have plenty of photos, some contributed by other stem scholars (thanks Amanda Goodson!), and I really feel like its looking good. Other than a graph or table to visually represent the scant results that I do have my poster is pretty much complete. Data analysis does not appear to be one of my strong suits but luckily that's Matt's forte. 

Here is a photo of some of the flowers I have been testing around campus:

Week 12

This week in lab we got our Estrella Mountain proposal results back. As far as I'm aware nearly everyone got accepted. Congrats everyone! Now we have to remember the the original purpose of our research, build a poster and tell a room full of people about it as if we actually know what is going on. All without having had enough time to generate any actual results. To be completely honest this all seems a little like a farce. 

For me personally this will be even more ludicrous as my English class also made me put in a proposal and that one was accepted too. I feel like I'm going to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to explain things I don't understand to people who know just barely less than I do. Is this what science always feels like? 

Cory and I talked and she made me see that this stuff is good practice for my real life. It can only get easier as I get more practice with these kinds of things. I really appreciated the new view point :) 

Here is a picture of an ornate tree lizard that my cat killed. This is the same speices we use to have in our little lizard cage in lab. You can tell from the blue belly strips that it was a male.

Week 11

Just so everyone knows I title my posts so boringly because it helps me keep tract of where we are in the semester. Now I've realized that we started blogging a few weeks after the semester started so I'm lost again. All I know is that its all coming to an end pretty soon here. Thanks the gods.

This week in lab I've done more of the same. I redid my original experiment. So mostly this week I made agar, added antibiotics, sterilized plant tissues and put them on my agar plates. This way I can show that my original results were not just a fluke and perhaps even be able to isolate a few more species of endophytes. 

This week I was also given a gift of a spectrophotometer. Its really old, probably from the 60's or so and I cant seem to get it to work. The light goes on but the dial doesn't register anything. I figured the % absorbance was being measured so I added food coloring to a vial but nothing changed. Does anyone know an old professor who might be able to fix my cool new toy?

Week 10

This week in lab I mostly looked for endophytes in various different plant species. Matt and Josh helped a lot. Matt went out out gathered different kinds of desert plants and all three of us sat around attempting to find endophytes in their tissues. We found a few in mesquite and the endophyte infused grasses that I planted earlier in the semester. It took forever but Josh was finally able to get a few pictures with the ipad. This is an art that requires finesse and patience. 

I also decided to rerun my orginal experiment to see if the results are the same. I sterilized and plated oleander tissues first because most of my suspected endophytes came from oleander. Next week I'll get the other two species on my list done. 

I believe this is a grass blade. You can see the fungal hyphae coming out of the plnt tissue here: