Monday remarks more than a week since we started running our experiment with the chemostat, and it is also the last day we allow our Vibrio natriegens to evolve under the selection force of the antibiotic resistance. We start the day with taking the final sample of our bacteria. Then, we start a group discussion to select the merits of the sample we have taken to decide what three samples to streak for isolation onto LB3 plates.
After the morning wet lab, we went to the dry lab to listen to lectures about safety, storage, and domestication of microbial cultures. We learned about a parallel example of domestication and studied why it is important for us to ensure that the strains we have today will remain unevolved and undomesticated when we make the freezer stock. After this lecture, Dr. Lamana continued to teach us techniques to come up with a hypothesis, a scientific educated guess. We started off with an Amoeba Sisters
We could go to lunch early today, yay! We are thrilled to discover that the sushi shop in the Union has now opened! Lunch is always the time we use to refill our energy (and our stomach) to get ourselves ready for the afternoon.
We continued our afternoon sessions with writing workshops. We paid attention to all of the activities because we know those writing skills are so crucial for us as we progress to write the manuscript. At 1:15PM, we have another lecture about heterogeneity in microbial populations. After that, we are off into the Galaxy with Dr. Carter to do genome assembly and editing. Finally, we ended our day with disassembling our chemostat for autoclaving purposes
We had an amazing dinner today. We all swapped tables so that we could have a conversation with more friends.
Today we have a black and gray dress code, and we all took a photo of all of us.
We all came to the dry lab again at night to start with our third PLA. We were more accustomed to this type of assignment now. Moreover, today’s assignment gave us more freedom over choosing the paper. Some of us are reading papers related to our antibiotics while others are reading about the Vibrio natriegens. Some friends even chose the paper written by our guest speakers. Group 8 is busy preparing for the introduction of our guest speaker tomorrow- Dr.Clint Chapple
Monday is also the day for residential meetings. At 8:30PM, we are discussing our plans for the field trip, the interview with the guest speaker, and our design for the T-shirt. (Phuong)
