Fee fi pho fum...I sense there's more to our tap water scum

Everything around us can provide us answers to questions we choose to ponder on. The objects we prefer to rely on to help us during a critical situation could be another source of hurt. Within the week, we have collected water samples from the eyewash found in DB building. This particular eyewash is meant to help us rinse out any dangerously foreign substance that might have gotten in our eyes. It is meant to be clean and safe. However, after our thorough filtration process (using the apparatus shown in the first picture), we have managed to find bacteria within the water used to rinse out our eyes. We used PIA and PF plates, which are used to isolate Pseudomonas bacteria (shown in the second and third picture below)

Tiny is not so tiny

Perception has an impact in so many ways. At times, we can easily say that our five senses have a way of deceiving us. We can not rely on them completely. Now you might ask, "what led her to think in such a way"? Besides being bombarded by such ideas in philosophy class, the microplastics we thought were so micro are, in fact, enormous...depending upon what you are viewing them under. 
Take this fellow, for instance (image below). It is so minute that its weight is almost negligible. 
However, when looked under an electron microscope...

The image is extraordinarily precise, I can not wait till I observe the bacteria growing on these plastics. The process wasn't difficult either. We asked Dr, Abeer to assist us with it, and she quickly proceeded to coat it with gold to minimize scattering as observed in the image below. As a conclusion, it's safe to say that this week was a wonderful experience.

Three Birds with one stone

The week started off pretty interesting. We ran PCR of our assigned bacteria (Pseudomonas stutzeri). But first, Amber taught us how to run PCR gel by following the protocol provided to us by Dr. Cotter.
 

I shared a gel with a teammate, Jasmine, who's assigned bacteria is Pseudomonas putida. Unfortunately, I had made a mistake of pouring pipetting my DNA on the wring pool; I should have pipetted on pools number 6 and 7 instead of 5 and 7. after running our PCR, this was the band we observed.
  
Later that week, we sterilized the ground plastic we had prepared. We had a number 3 (PVC), a number 4 (LDPE), and a number 5 (PP). The processes wasn't complicated, but it did require careful handling to avoid contamination. We first put some plastic in small, autoclaved beaker after labeling the beakers. Then, 40 ml of 100% isopropanol was added to them in the fume hood then left them in there till we decide to use them during our next research meeting. 


Finally, today, we inoculated from our plates to thioglycollate tubes to identify if our bacteria is an aerobe, an anaerobe, facultative, or aerotolerant bacteria and left three tubes in incubation (bacteria PA, PP, and PS), and left PF at room temperature. 

Hopefully, we shall see some results from our tubes tomorrow. 

One step closer...

This week, the team had the opportunity to extract DNA from their bacteria. During the first week, we had to pick the bacteria we want to work on throughout the semester, and I had picked Pseudomonas stutzeri. Right now, the goal of the extraction is to run a PCR so that we could have our PCR primers to later try and culture some bacteria from specific types of plastic so that we can see if a specific type of Pseudomonas does, in fact, grow and degrade that form of plastic. 
In addition to that, this week, I was asked to prepare a ground form of plastic number 6, which we decided to use styrofoam for. To grind it, we used a blender. Seemed like a good idea until blending it became a disaster when static electricity chose to be a part of the blending. I couldn't get the styrofoam to stay in the blender. the more I blended and opened to check on it, the more of a mess I made. However, in the end, I asked if water can be added while blending so that it could get rid of the static electricity. After blending using water, Matt agreed to evaporate the water to leave us with our plastic. 


So far, my week has been very productive and successful. Hope the next week is as successful...