Well it’s already half way through second week, meaning we have exactly 2 weeks left in the block now! Only 2 weeks till winter break, a long much-needed break from school. I’m really looking forward to it after taking two lab classes in a row. Lab classes really have a way of wearing you out.
We had our first test on Monday this week. It wasn’t too bad, but the first test of every block for me at least is usually a learning experience. It gives me a chance to get to know how I can change my studying for the next test and how the tests are generally structured. We still haven’t gotten the results back yet, but I’m sure we will soon. Having tests on Mondays always somehow make the rest of the week go by a lot faster.
Lecture in class is always extremely interesting and without fail, some piece of technology doesn’t work correctly, but Phoebe continues through lecture occasionally attempting to correct the failure. Oh the perils of technology. It seems like everyone I know has had some sort of trouble with some piece of technology this past week. It’s crazy.
This week we have discussed how bacteria make the products that are required to build specific structures. It is amazing how much it differs from how humans make the products necessary for structure and survival. Most of what we know about how bacteria do this is still not completely understood. What I am learning is that there is still a lot of research that needs to be done on bacteria to figure out how they work. This is intriguing because it means that there must be a lot of job openings out there in this field that could benefit us college students as we graduate in the upcoming years.
We have done a variety of labs this week continuing the research we started last week on our ADP1 mutants. On Monday we prepared our heat and cold stress test. This test is used to see if the mutants are able to grow under different temperatures. It was a pretty interesting test, because we obtained growth at 20 degrees celsius which I wasn’t expecting , but after realizing that 20 degrees celsius is 68 degrees farenheit, I soon realized it wasn’t that cold. It makes sense that they would be able to grow at about that temperature.
Tuesday we set up our UV light sensitivity test to determine what dose of UV light would kill the bacteria the best. Upon examining our results today, we realized that not even the highest dose significantly killed the bacteria. I thought that was pretty amazing because it was suppose to damage their DNA and kill them at a high dose. It sounds pretty mean to be killing the bacteria, but we can always get more to grow because the grow so quickly. One of the graph’s we made it called a Kill Curve and if anyone were to just hear us discussing a Kill Curve outside of class they might be a little concerned. My lab partner and I laugh about it all the time.
Today we did our second Twitching Motility test and are still waiting on results for that test. Tomorrow we will be performing our second Growth Curve trial and hopefully will get some similar results to our first test. I also hope that it won’t take nearly as long as the first trial. Mainly because I have an IM Basketball game tomorrow night. It’s kind of a big deal because we have to win otherwise we are out of the tournament. So I need to be there. I have a feeling though that this trial will go faster due to some adjustments made by Phoebe.
Only two more days till the weekend and only one more day of lab for the week!
