empirical assay…take 3

so this was the 3rd day that ive spent on empirical assay. my plates weren’t fully webbed so i had to do it again with more microliters. i’m going to save the 10 plates for next week so im hoping the plates from today worked and i wont have to do it a FOURTH time!

empirical assay

so on tuesday and wednesday my group did our empirical assays..at first the instructions were SOO confusing for some reason so we spent most of tuesday trying to figure out calculations and procedure and did dilutions…but we made fresh dilutions on wednesday just in case and then did the plates too! wednesday was MUCHHHH better than tuesday and moved much much faster

spot test

so this week i got to do my spot test which at first i was slightly nervous about because it seemed like all the stuff on the agar was going to run together but thankfully it didn’t and it all worked out!! and then our second lab day was pretty chill but it was good to work on the lab manual and also to calculate because that really helped me understand what we were doing better! also i really like the whole learning people’s names thing because i think i probably know like maybe 6 people’s names and other than that i have no clue so im glad to finally get to know these people i see pretty much every day!!!

plaques!

so  i was reallyyyy nervous that i wasn’t going to have a plaque or it was going to be contaminated or something but turns out it was okay!! and yesterday went pretty well because it was just some dilutions using the plaque that we picked from one of our plates! today was pretty much the same thing but i felt like it worked a little smoother & faster. but my plaques from yesterday werent as clear as my original ones so im really hoping that these plates that i did today turn out okay!

frustrating!

soooo today was quite frustrating. we had to basically redo the last 2 days of work because there was problems with the TA not being mixed properly or smeg or not solidifying..basically the plate thing failed. but it didn’t take toooo long to redo the past 2 lab periods’ work….only about 3 hours which sounds like a lot and it is but i guess since i actually knew what to do it went by faster…im REALLY hoping these plates arent messed up again because redoing it a third time would be super frustrating…crossing my fingers that when i go check on them tomorrow they’ll look like they’re supposed to…

messy day in the lab

well today’s lab day was a little bit confusing to me at first…we talked about the lab out of order and so it was a little harder to remember which procedure the “recipe” went with and which procedure you had to pretend was radioactive…but after a few minutes it was okay & it was easy to follow! i was kind of bummed because i messed up on one of my plates…i spilled some of the culture or whatever its called because i spun the wheel the wrong way on the pipetter…way to go. but it still had a lot of liquid and im hoping itll be okay? and that plate had bubbles in it too & none of the other ones did…basically the 10 to the -3 plate was a fail. but other than that everything else went pretty good today!!

dirt–i mean SOIL sample

Yes, Bio 1405 had summer homework. Collect some dirt and stick it in a Ziploc. I mean, collect some SOIL (sounds more scientific that way) and put it into a container. But seriously the class is really cool! Turns out that the soil is where we’re going to be finding our phages! I just got my soil sample from around the Baylor Marina…I really have no clue what makes a good soil sample for “phage hunting” but I’m hoping the marina’s a good spot…? We’ve already used the soil samples…we kind of jumped right in on the first day of lab which was pretty awesome to be able to do stuff right away & we’ve already learned a lot of techniques! I was actually kind of nervous for the lab part but it seems like it’s going to be pretty cool & I really like that we’ve only had 2 lab classes and we’ve already done A LOT!

Excited for next lab day!