dont ride your bike in scrubs…..

This week I learned it is a bad idea to wear over sized scrubs and ride a bike in the freezing cold. I probably won't be riding again until it warms up a little. Luckily, when my pants were torn in my chain, they didn't rip enough to prevent me from going to class. That day we preformed DNA extractions from six of our desert samples with a kit provided by Dr. Rainey. Wednesday we ran our DNA on gels, registered on eztaxon.com, and observed our dilution pates from both before and after radiation exposure. I found it very interesting to observe the difference in organisms found between the two. Plates from before radiation exposure were covered in large tan colonies that are possibly bacilli while the plates that were irradiated had less growth and more presence of pink and coral colonies. This is most likely due to the fact that before radiation, organisms such as bacilli inhibited the growth of these pink and coral colonies and now that the bacilli and radiation-sensitive organisms were killed, the radiation-resistant organisms that we are possibly looking for are able to grow. Pre-irradiation we observed growth from 10-1 to 10-4 with the best growth and most diversity present on our 1/10 and 1/100 PCA. On our 1/100 PCA we had some very cool snowflake looking colonies that I can't wait to take a picture of! Our irradiated organisms didn't like the marine agar and grew the best on PCA.