November 17, 2017

WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING

This week, I continued construction on my chamber. I put plumbers tape on the gears to try to ensure that it is still harder for air to escape when transferring it into the chamber. In addition, I compared more tubes to find one that would actually fit on the ends. I believe there was one gauge that fit really well on the tubes, but unfortunately we only have one of that size (more on the way). One thing I learned from this is that the tubes are as important as the gears themselves. I can’t use a simple solution to fixing the issue of not finding a tube that fits. At first I tried wrapping the part that would connect to the tubes with tape in order for the tubes to fit. However, it is very possible this resulted in the vacuum not being as effective. I would not be very surprised by this explanation since when I put a marshmallow into the chamber to test the vacuum, it did not work as well as I had hoped. But I think new tubes should make the vacuum even more effective than before. Another concern I have is with the bluetooth sensor. The one I had used last year is not matching up with another temperature sensor. I believe the other sensor to be more accurate, so it worried me that the bluetooth Arduino sensor was a couple of degrees off. This may mean that the pressure is not accurate either. Another issue is that sometimes the temperature was seen to be negative 20,000°. I do not know why this was all happening, so I consulted with the physics teacher who had helped program this last year, and he said to connect it to the computer to look at the actual programming to see what was up. While I haven’t really figured out how to connect it yet, I also saw online that I was not the only one with this programming, and I believe there to be some solutions. I also made another agar plate of bacteria, and have created a plan to run curves and hopefully some tests with antibiotics for when I come back from Thanksgiving break.

October 24, 2017

DATA + FIRES

Over the last two weeks, I have been analyzing and testing results of data that I got before. I believe that I may need to increase the initial OD from .01, as I have done in the past, to .1. The change comes from seeing the curve change based on the data. However, I still intend on running this again, just to confirm the results as I go into the next stages of the project.

       In addition, last week, something happened that prompted me to have some questions. The fires in Sonoma and Santa Rosa were very intense, and the smoke was blown south, towards Marin. As they were going on, and as the air quality decreased, I began to think about the repercussions of the particles in the air on the growth of the bacteria. Specifically, would the decreased air quality affect the speed of proliferation on PSA? My hypothesis is that it would, but the virulence would not be affected, and it might also be less susceptible to antibiotics, because the cells are not uptaking as much oxygen as when there is more oxygen in the air.

September 29, 2017

FIRST WEEK BACK!

This week, I have begun work on the actual, hands-on, part of my project. I made the broth and agar last Thursday, which entailed measuring the amount of powder as dictated on the bottle, and then mixing it with water on a heated top, which has a spinning magnet in the machine, that would spin a magnet piece inside the container, and would mix the powder and water until dissolved. The broth and the agar were kept in the fridge, and on Monday, I subcultured a culture received from Dominican University of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This was done by using a disposable loop, taking part of the bacteria from the Dominican plate, and putting it on one of the new agar plates. The intention of this step is that I will have less chances of contaminating the original culture, and can use the subculture for when I put the bacteria into a broth, and later test the bacteria.