My 2nd Week of Howard Hughes
Hello everybody…
Guess what, I have a new buddy in my lab!
NEW BUDDY’S PROFILE
Name: Brook Teffera
School: Rising Junior at Jordan High School
Hobby: Soccer and nothing really else…..
Program he’s working with: Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT)
What he wants to get out of the program: To gain experience as a biomedical engineer.
Other summer plans: Finish his AP project.
Top: Brook Teffera from Jordan High School. Bottom: Kauro Ikuma, a third year graduate student also working in Dr.Gunsch's lab.
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He’s not the only one though. Kauro Ikuma, a third year graduate student who left for Sweden two weeks ago to attend a conference, just got back! Christina told me that Kauro is very knowledgeable and that I will learn lots from her. I’m so excited!! Kauro is an international student at Duke. She grew up in Japan, but for college, came to the U.S and attended Virginia Tech. for her B.S and Masters. Being a major overachiever, she earned two degrees in her undergraduate years in Biology and Biochemistry and a minor in Chemistry. When it came time for her Masters, she studied Environmental Engineering. When I asked Kauro why she worked so hard during her college life, all Kauro said was that she wanted to go to medical school. But due to the high tuition costs, she allowed herself to wander a different direction and coincidentally fell in love with Environmental Science when she took Environmental Microbiology. Starting her third year at Duke, Kauro’s dissertation will be something along the lines of “The Horizontal gene transfer of the Tol plasmid: Evaluating conjugation events that result in functional phenotypes.” Fancy name, huh? I’ve looked at dissertation names and had to wonder, who comes up with these long and fancy titles? Anyways, back to Kauro, she presumes that the title of her dissertation will change and is hoping to one day become a Professor.
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Other than my two new lab partners, this week has been fairly slow. Everyday when I came into the lab, I headed to the incubator (yes… the stinky incubator) and took out my inoculated LB broth with E.coli. This media, that has stayed overnight, is very opaque. The cloudiness lets me know that the E.coli has reached its threshold, its maximum growth. So before the bugs (that’s what my lab calls the bacteria) die, I need to take out 1ml of it and transfer it into a new LB broth so it can grow in the media until it reaches it maximum growth the next day. And this I continue over and over and over again.. until I no longer have to work with E.Coli.
A spectrophotometer that takes O.D measurements. Me holding up a cubic.
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On Thursday, I took Optical Density (O.D) measurements of my newly inoculated LB broth with E.coli so I could see for myself the growth curve of an E.coli colony. Every thirty minutes, from the time I inoculated the media, I would take the O.D measurements from the machine. By the way, the O.D machine measures the amount of light that can penetrate the solution that is put into a little cubic, which goes into the machine to be measured. After collecting 6 hours worth of O.D measurements, I went home that night and made a scatter graph. From studying it, I learned the exponential growth cycle of E.Coli!
From looking at the flasks, you can tell which one is 24 hours old or newly inoculated. Left is old while the right is new LB broth.
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Next week, Brooke and I are going to start on our leaches. I know I said I would do it earlier on when I first amputated the teddy bear, but because the necessary materials, that were ordered, arrived late, the leaching process had to be rescheduled to next week. Just to kill time, I cut the other leg of the poor doll for fresh samples.
The teddy bear has lost both arms and legs.
Well so far, the Howard Hughes Program has been amazing. Unlike school, which seems to go on and on, HH is going way too fast. I just want to command time to go slower! Ridiculous amount of pipetting, tedious measurements on the scale, or even just standing in the lab makes me feel this warm glow within me. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but just being in a lab makes me feel really good. Maybe it’s that cool breeze with a hint of new paint scent. However, I do know for sure what my favorite reason of being in the lab is: I always get to learn something new! Working in the lab, I’m continuously pushed to think. Studies show that high school students get dumb over the summer due to the lack of thinking. I absolutely agree to this from prior experience, but, I know this summer everything is different!
