Week Five
I am flying through my internship, so fast it will be gone before I realize. Already, I am starting to wonder where my weeks went. As it was for my last few months in France, these last few weeks in San Diego have skipped by too fast, leaving in their wake memories and an after image of accomplishment.
To prove the point, this is week six, and I am writing week five blog post. I have been so busy, the last two weeks felt like one, because it all blended, although at the at the same time I’m thinking, ‘was it really on nine days ago that I began this string of experiments?’ Week six blog post will come in a few days, if for no reason other than I can’t fit all that I have done into one post. But let us now begin where I left off.
So I ran a growth curve test, which basically measures the amount of bacteria in a solution at intervals over a period of time. I wanted to see if bacteria exposed to the antibiotic Gentamicin grew less or grew slower than normal. This test I preformed 2 weeks ago failed. My bacteria didn’t grow for what ever reason, and I didn’t get any data.
Right after, I tried again. This time I was careful– more careful. I tried to do everything perfect, taking my sweet time to build the solutions and transfer the bacteria. And this test failed too, although in the opposite direction. Everything grew regardless of the antibiotic. When I complained to my mentor, Yan Wei, she replied science is about trouble shooting.
We read up on it, which is another crucial aspect of science; reading work done before and learning from it. We found a new protocol that called for using much higher concentrations of a different antibiotic, Carbenicilin. I designed a new experiment with this in mind and this one actually worked. The bacteria isolated from healthy lungs was killed completely by the antibiotic at even the lowest concentrations, while the bacteria from a CF patient were more resistant. One sample grew even in the highest concentration, 2 mg/ml of Carbenicilin.
I was happy and wanted to go further. The solution the bacteria grew in was just that, a solution. I wanted something more closely relating to the environment in the lungs. So I did the same experiment again, this time using something called artificial sputum, made from proteins, salmon sperm (for random DNA, I guess), and sugars. I also adjusted the concentrations slightly.
As I said, the time is racing by. Oh, and speaking of racing, I was 42nd in the aquathon. I did better than I thought I would do in the ten K run, but the mile swim hurt. I ended up finishing in 93 minutes, which passed, like my internship has been passing, quite quickly.
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