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...