Fall 2015 Week 14

Hey all!

I've decided to get the very last blog of the semester done early so I can concentrate on finals.

I anticipate that this week I will mostly work on my final paper. I have been working on this project for an entire calendar year and I feel like it paid off. I now appreciate how a graduate student genuinely needs to spend at least a year on one research topic to thoroughly understand it. I'm planning on changing my topic next semester but will miss my endophytes.

I will miss all the S-STEM people while on break. I hope that most, if not all, of you will be back next semester.

Happy Holidays!

Fall 2015 Week 13

This week in lab has been spent counting the sprouted seeds for the allelopathy project I'm doing with Matt.
Last week I counted seeds into petri plates and poured a 10% solution of composted leaves and water over the plates. We are testing to see if the chemicals that prevent germination of the seeds in the leaves can be degraded with composting. If the chemical is degraded then there will be no statistical difference between the plates that were watered with leaf extract and those watered with de-ionized water.
This week I counted all the sprouted seeds. Most of the sprouts were twisted around each other making them very hard to count. There is still more calculations to do but from the rough data gathered on Tuesday it looks like composting degraded the allelopathic chemicals.