My week for Biol 4126 got started rather late....

On Monday I was not able to attend class because of a malfunction within my body. Nonetheless, Rainey assured me that if I had passed away class would be canceled. I thought that was rather kind of him to cancel class just so my fellow classmates could mourn. Anyhow, I was brought up to speed and informed about EVERYTHING that had taken place in my absence. To my knowledge I missed the opportunity to perform the dessication experiment, and setup the PCR using the Arizona soils. In addition, our stock culture plates were restreaked. Most importantly, was the discussion about the IJESM paper which is due on April 20. Upon my return, I immediately got to work! First we got out our old carbon plates and analyzed them carefully. To my dismay, our plates were highly contaminated. To correct this we had to make liquid suspensions of our strains. This was done by combining 500 microliters of saline solution with a loopful of our strain. Following this we vortex the tubes vigourously. From this we spotted the strains on the carbon source from our previous experiment and the carbon sources intended for this lab. All in all, we had a lot of work to do. Oh...yea...and we also held up the entire class :)
On the bright side, spring break 2009 is this week! With that being said, I hope everyone has as much fun as I will ♥