I think I’m getting pro at doing stuff. I believe the amount of work we did today is quite similar to some other days, but we finished before lunch and i get to go home for the day! How awesome is that?

Oh and J broke a mercury thermometer today, so i finally got to see what mercury looks like

Anyway, today… we collected, centrifuged, and filtered our 26 poo samples from yesterday. While J subcultured more plates for tomorrow, I prepared bacteria broth for overlays for more plate spotting. Then we spotted the plates. 25 diff phage, 24 diff spp.  SO my point is i think I’m getting pretty good at this.

The bad news is, tomorrow is my last day.

Went to a chicken farm today. One of those far away places where they grow chickens in gigantic sheds. Glad to say it didn’t smell as bad as the abattoir. It was also a lot harder to find chicken poo there… so we ended up like… looking for chicken poo-ing then collect what comes out… they’re still warm! ok enough grossness. Oh, and I found myself talking to the chickens when I was trying to get out of the shed. I wanted to be nice and not scare them so I walked slowly and said to them “excuse me…” But i don’t think they cared much cuz they didn’t budge. So finally I got out anyway cuz fast movements scare them out of the way… SO ya. so much for trying to be nice.

The place was about 95kms from Adelaide so we spent ages going there, and coming back. We left the city at about 8:30am, and when we got back it was 1:30pm.

Put the samples to shake, and I analysed yesterday’s spotting results, while J subcultured more bacteria for tomorrow.

So now I’m done and it’s 3pm and I’ve only eaten some biscuits to curb my hunger while I type this out and i shall now go home for lunch…

I completely skipped Day 24. Nothing too exciting anyway. I cultured about 80 species of CJ. And I can’t remember what else i did but it was a short day. Then i went for lunch, went to Clinique to get some freebies, and went to work at night. And got friggin hammered. 5.5 hours. Hardly a minute break. it was one helluva busy night.

Today:

- prepared stuff for overlays

- went to very very long meeting

- finished overlay preparation

- lunch

- plate spotting (20 CJ spp., 20 phage)

- poured lots of plates…

finished at 4:30pm

Yesterday’s dilution was rather successful!

After i went home J spotted plates with them (thank god she didnt ask me to spot them with her although i felt bad that she did those herself… ><) and it gave some pretty good results!

So I spent my morning counting little dots and calculting concentrations.

We ran another gel

poured more plates.

and that was the end of the day.

This is getting boring.

Started off with removing the buffer from the plates we shook in the cold room yesterday. Then it became another one of those days where I feel like my thumbs were going to fall off. 26 samples, each had to be diluted 10 times. 260 eppendorf tubes. Friggin nightmare.

Fortunately after that it was almost 2pm and J had to go home early today so no point of me going back after lunch. Early day.

So i came home and ate and slept.

Oh, and J mentioned a visit to an actual Free range chicken farm. to collect more samples. I couldn’t get myself to tell her NO i dont want to go, so I heard myself say ”yeah sure” and I might be collecting more crap on weds next week…

I took the following pic the day we made the ‘pretty’ gel. This is what the gel looks like under UV light in one of those super old antique machines:

I took the pic with my cellphone looking through the little spy eye hole… so it’s not the best photo but aren’t the colours pretty??? (it looks nicer in real life. it’s like.. purple light, and Orange colored DNA bands..)

A bit of a slow moving day today…

Yesterday’s overlays- a few were successful. yay. So we poured some buffer over it and let it shake overnight in the cold and harvest tomorrow.

Did another gel, which turned out looking quite nice. But we couldn’t get the picture to focus so we switched off the machine, turned it back again- and it wouldn’t turn on. So while the machine is being fixed, our gel deteriorates and can no longer be used… so no picture. what a waste of time. =.=

made some SM Buffer.

poured a couple of types of agar plates.

and the highlight of the day: Went to the molecular and biotechnology (i think) Building of Uni Adelaide, and bought some DNA (100bp ladders for the gel electrophoresis) from … a vending machine! We put in this card, type in the password and pick what we want… and it dispenses what we need. It’s the coolest thing ever because there’s like… 4 different doors in which the t hing can be dispensed from, and when it’s given you the right thign you open the door and take it out. ok maybe it’s not THat exciting but i was excited. Xp

Oooh and that thing costs like … $122 for 50mcg. Which means we can use it about 33 times, which adds up to about $4 per ladder on one gel. Today’s gel that we threw away had 2 ladders on it. that’s $8 thrown away… 

Oh and on a side note, the filters we used to filter our samples cost about $3 each. We filtered about 60 samples in one day… that’s $180…

9:30am: Still crossing the road to uni. late again.

When finally got there, we prepared stuff for another PCR and gel electrophoresis. (to test if we can get ANY bands from c.coli at all… cuz we have been getting NOTHING)

Melted some overlay agar, prepared some phage to be mixed with overlay, labelled agar plates…

went to lunch.

after lunch came back and poured out the overlays… and looked at our result for the gel electrophoresis.

Verdict: No bands. Again.

What a failure… =.=

Now this is a pretty gel.

The ‘ladders’ on both ends are nicely spread out and clear. The negative control (4th column) is actually Negative. The residues on the bottom are fuzzy… like they should be. Not clear bands like they were yesterday.

Today was a day of random stuff… we were meant to have a look phage under the electron microsope. Someone was going to show us how to do it and look for phages… but about an hour before we went, they said it was cancelled. Agh. So there goes the plans for the day.

J is on duty this month to make sure everything is clean, stocked and in order where we did the PCR and gels… so I spent my day helping her around with topping up buffer (we made like 2L of it. Had some problems with the pH probe doing silly things and things not dissolving but in the end we did it :)) Also poured more plates. They keep on running out…

Oh, and cultured more bacteria from the freezer box.

And that was it. Long day, for some unknown reason. The lift wasnt working as well so we had to walk up and down the stairs. A couple of times down to the 1st floor and back up again. That’s my exercise for the day (well, I’m working later, so that’s a bit of exercise too!)

PCR Gel #5. Failure. :S

The NEGATIVE control turned out positive… for C. coli. And every single test had an extra band at the bottom… I can’t figure out where that came from. I swear I tried my best not to contaminate anything… I mean, it worked the first 4 times I did it…

At least this round we know that diluting our DNA even more works though. In the previous two tests, (i did not post pictures) but the top band didn’t exist… strangely enough, nothing showed up because there was uhm… too much DNA. so we diluted it 1:9. Twice. And then it turned out fine. That’s like a 100x dilution!! Ok I’m getting a bit excited over silly things that no one cares about now…

At 12pm we attended a seminar about chronic diseases and its relationship with our diet… Apparently the mediterranean diet, although chocked full of oil (Olive oil) is a lot healthier than the average Australian diet. Tests show that the majority of people in their study who tried a Mediterranean diet for 3 months lost weight, and maintained it while those who tried a low-fat diet was less successful. They also became a lot healthier.

Maybe it was time I went on a Mediterranean diet. But then… what exactly is Mediterranean food…?