Today was an incredibly hectic day. Not including lunch and dinner breaks, we spent from 8:30 AM – 10:30 PM today in the lab. Unfortunately, our chemostat was faulty, and malfunctioned at several points throughout our lab. As a result, we eventually decided that the best course of action was to switch to a new chemostat, which involved redoing the calibrations we had already done for the other one. Despite the frustration this entailed, it was a very useful learning experience, as we learned a significant amount about the chemostat and it’s functionality that we wouldn’t have had it run completely smoothly. It was frustrating, but I do appreciate the experiment. One of the coolest parts was calibrating the optical density detector (the calibration is visualized below), which we will later use to detect how much our bacterial samples have grown by seeing how obscured the solution is. Thankfully, we were able to finish, and our chemostat is now in the autoclave. I am very much looking forward to resting, though I’m excited for when we truly start the experiment. Good night.
