A Lab Notebook

 
New S. costatum culture
I waited too long with the S. costatum from the past few weeks. I checked the size distribution of the culture, and there were far too many small cells (indicative of high abundance bacteria). Since I desire low quantities of bacteria, I am starting the whole process over, with more focus on transferring the 1 liter cultures into 20 liter cultures containers when the Fv/Fm is near 0.60
Today I made the Trace Metal solution which will be used for both the 20 liter cultures and the flume runs which should take place in the next 14 days. When the flume experiment starts up this notebook of mine will be very, very active (Zib, Mutz, Stan and Bryan all know what fun my lab work can be as they helped me with my flume run last summer).
Also, today in the lab placed a 5 month old S. costatum culture under a microscope to see what I could see. I'll put up the picture sometime next wseek, but the results were very cool. I cam away with a 3D-like image of the surface of a phytoplankton mat. The phytoplankton mat is the result of a bunch of marine snow that fell to the bottom of the flask over time.
I took yesterday off from running, and did about 5 miles in Central Park with Zib this morning. We ran about 50 minutes at an easy pace in the cool sunny morning of early spring. Unfortunately, I think we may get some snow tomorrow or the day after, so the next few runs will be pretty chilly.
- posted by alex @ 21:35