Summer Week 12

This week I have not been in lab. I haven't even been in Phoenix for over a week. Hurray!!!

Instead of sitting in a boring, stuffy lab all day (haha not really), I have been running all around Colorado. My friends Luke and Jason moved here over two years ago and this is the first time I've seen them since then. Its been so great getting caught up with them and adventuring around Colorado.

I'm looking forward to getting back in the lab when school starts again. For now, here is a photo of beautiful Boulder:

Summer Week 11

I'm doing my blog early this week because I'm headed to Denver WOOT!

I anticipate most of my time will be spent working on my final project. Thankfully the structure of my project is similar to the one I did in the Spring, so much of the background information and literature citations do not need to be reexamined.

One thing that I've been more concerned about since looking at my past research is my sterilization method. Most of the literature concerning endophytes says to use a low concentration of sodium hypochlorate, bleach, to sterilize the surface of plant tissues. I, however, found that the bleach was so caustic that it killed all possible endophytes.

In this table from Spring 2015 shows what kinds of fungi I grew based on how long I soaked the tissues in bleach. C means contaminate, + means possible endophyte and - means no growth at all.

As can be seen after even one minute of soaking in bleach nothing is growing on my plates. There are two possible explanations for this: the bleach solution used last semester was incorrectly diluted making it more concentrated than expected, or bleach is caustic to fungi at any concentration.

I have been getting better results using 100% ethanol for 5 minutes but have only found one other paper that uses exclusively ethanol, which makes me wary...

Summer Week 10

This week in lab has been spent in contemplation of my summer. As it nears to an end, and I begin to write my final paper, I am compelled to think about all I have accomplished:

• Staining plant tissues to identify endophytes microscopically
• Perfecting my sterilization technique to include the laminar hood
• Moving my fungi from bengal agar to potato dextrose agar
• Using tape mounts to stain fungal structures 
• Using super cooled ethanol to freeze dry fungal tissues
• Extracting DNA with a kit

I certainly have had a productive summer. But I think the most important thing I did this summer was sit down and discuss with Cori how to organize my data. I have been struggling with this since I got into this program. What to write down and in what format. Cori really helped me understand how it is people in labs organize data and helped me make more sense of my lab notebook. She's a great mentor

This is a video showing my freeze drying setup