Friday, December 14, 2012

Pea plant experiment

Currently I'm on my 9th set of pea plants working with different temperatures to determine the optimum conditions for them to germinate.
Light cycle
24hr Dark
6hr light
12hr light
18hr light
24hr light
temperature
20°C
30/30
29/30
28/30
29/30
25°C
30/30
29/30
30°C
4/30
35°C

These are the results I have so far. The peas are set for a 7 day period and after that if one didn't germinate there is a 90% chance that it won’t germinate at a later period. The current set that I'm running right now is set at an 18 hour light cycle out of 24 hours at a temperature of 20°C. The most recent one that was just completed was the one with a 12 hour light cycle and 20°C. Below is a picture of the most recent set and this particular set was left for about 2 weeks in the incubator because I was preoccupied and wasn't able to attend to them so they had some significant growth.

Now that the year was coming to end I have to finish writing my abstract for my project so that I can present it at ASU for one of the conferences they're having which is in March but the deadline for it is on January 11th. Writing the abstract is a difficult thing well at least for me it is. I'm not able to start it as easily as the last one I wrote. It is proving to be difficult, while I know what I should write I'm having trouble with starting it. Next year I think I'm going to be attending 2 conferences, one at ASU and the other at Estrella mountain college, so that means I have to do 2 abstracts and 2 separate posters to present at each individual conference. I feel confident in presenting since I have already done it twice this year but now it's a more advanced project.

Monday, December 3, 2012


The past week has been busy with everything going on from school work to the projects I'm working on. I inoculated plates with all the samples of algae that I had to see how many bacterial communities appeared. It was a bit difficult to count them all because there was so many and once you lost count you had to start all over. The picture to the left is one of the plates that had the most bacteria growth on it.

I also went through one of the racks that contained Ammonium Chloride stock in it and put them on a slide so that I could be able to identify the different species of algae that were present. The task proved to be difficult most of the algae was a little hard to identify because of the quality of the microscope. One of the main species that I was able to identify was Protococcus and then there was some unidentifiable Protozoans.                                  
Today I went to analyze the results for my pea plant experiment and I had 29/30 peas that germinated in the incubator at 20 degrees Celsius with 6 hours of light and 18 hours of darkness. I still have multiple temperatures and light to experiment on so that I'm able to figure out what is the optimal conditions for the pea plants to grow

Monday, November 19, 2012

Picture

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at my samples of algae under the microscope and I decided to take a picture of my findings. I posted this picture a while back in my other blog that was used to keep track of everything. This picture is of a blue green algae that grew in my eutrophication experiment. It looks different from the first time I saw it mainly because the picture was taken a day after I extracted it from the tube so it was dehydrated but the picture does look good.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Projects

Currently I have 2 projects that I'm working on. The first which is my main project about eutrophication and what I'm mainly doing for this is identifying the different species of algae that grows in Rio Salado while also altering the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen. Last semester I determined that phosphorus was the most limiting nutrient. One of the problems I had when I first started this project was being able to identify the algae but over time it became easier even though I'm not the best or close to that. My second project is about pea plants and determining what are the best conditions for it to germinate and currently that is at a stand still because there is no open incubator. Changing the temperature and how much light the plant gets affects the germination rate. I guess you can say I'm somewhat busy for a good while. :)

Friday, November 9, 2012

Hey guys :)

Hi my name is Gilbert and I have been an intern here at PC for more than a year now. Currently I'm working on my research preject that has been ongoing since last year. My project is based on eutrophication in our community.