Week of 4/2/17

Today was my first day back in the lab in over a month! I was really eager to get back. Yi finished his thesis defense, which is awesome, but that also meant that e was really tired so we ended up just doing a few simple tasks in the lab today.

First, we prepared some cultures and began growing bacteria. I pipetted three milliliters of LB broth into a tube under a flame, and repeated this process five times. Then, Yi gave me six different samples of bacteria to pipette into the individual tubes. Again, we performed this process under the flame.

Once all of the bacteria had been loaded into the tubes with growth medium and labeled, we placed them in the fridge to grow. If we had wanted them to grow faster, we could have put them in an incubator shaker for two to three hours at thirty-seven degrees. When bacterial samples are shook, the agitation incorporates oxygen and evenly distributes nutrients to all the bacteria, helping promote faster growth.


An incubator shaker. https://megadepot.com/product/ika-works-3940100-ks-3000-ic-control-incubator-shaker

After leaving the bacteria in the fridge, Yi and I had no more work to do. We offered help to another graduate student working in the lab, and she asked us to prepare 250 milliliters of 3 M NaCl. It was quite simple to calculate how many grams of powdered NaCl to use, I have outlined my calculations below.

3 mol / L * (.250 L) = .75 mol NaCl wanted
.75 mol 8 (58.44 g / mol) = 43.83 grams of NaCl

I weighed 43.83 grams of NaCl and poured it into a liter flask. Then, I added enough distilled water to bring the total number of milliliters of solution to 250 mL, and then shook and swirled the flask vigorously until the solution was completely dissolved.

I was very happy to get back in the lab this week. Even the simplest tasks are really fun, and I appreciate them even more as the year winds down. Can't wait for next week!