I am Aubrielle Weaver, spending my summer in San Diego, California, at San Diego State University (SDSU). For six weeks I have been studying microbiology. My mentor is Gregory Burkeen, who is a Ph.D. student at SDSU. This is week 6 and my final week of my internship. I encourage you to read my previous blogs in order to understand more of what I’m doing.
Greg brought in vinegar so that I could get acetobacter aceti by putting pure ethanol and vinegar onto my plate and in a liquid media. Once I did that I put them in an incubator. ON my plaque assay plates from Friday I had no plaques. I’m hoping to get a plaque from Acetobacter aceti. I made mannitol liquid and solid media for the vinegar bacteria because a procedure online did that successfully. I also washed and autoclaved more tubes. I then did a DNA extraction with my gram positive bacteria. It turned into a huge pellet that wasn’t just DNA like it was supposed to be. I had to let the pellet turn overnight.
The next morning the pellet was still there and not dissolved. So I started to heat it to try and dissolve it. I got it broken up but none dissolved. Before I continued with that I made liquid cultures out of the mannitol media. I made three with different concentrations of bacteria. I also streaked from yesterday’s liquid culture onto a mannitol plate. I continued to dissolve the DNA once those were put in the incubator. Heat wasn’t working so I ended up putting it through a column to clean it up. The concentration was really low so I just threw the sample away.
My plate from the day before had no growth so I streaked from my highest concentration liquid culture. And then I made a plaque assay with my medium concentration and the enrichment from earlier. I split one of the cultures into two. One became an enrichment. The other I did nothing with. I did a DNA extraction from one of the liquid cultures. It was a very easy extraction but had a low concentration of DNA.
On Thursday I didn’t have any plaques. And I noticed that the bacteria on the plaque assay plates wasn’t the same as the streaked. The streaked plate is likely the one I was looking for. I made new liquid cultures of everything so that I could freeze it the next day and add it to the library. Greg will identify them later.
The next day I grabbed my liquid cultures and froze them adding a product to protect them from ice crystals. Once those were frozen, Greg had the idea of lysing the gram positive bacteria with enzyme soap typically used to clean surgical instruments. And it worked! We got 650 ng/ml which is way more than anything before. For lunch Greg took Rachel and I to pizza which was delicious. And once I said my goodbyes I left SDSU for the last time.
The soap used
This was the high concentration.
The weekend became crazy. The air bnb I had been staying in closed at 11 on Saturday, yet my Dad’s flight was scheduled to land at 9:30pm. I had ten and a half hours to figure out what to do. I went to lunch with Jennie, the host mom-like person at the air bnb, and then explored San Diego more.
This was my lunch. The fries were amazing.
I went to this hill with an amazing view but didn’t get good photos. I also bought myself a crew neck and went to Barnes and Noble and got myself some books I wanted along with one for my mom.
This is the book I got for my Mom
At this point I had five hours left. So I decided to go to Coronado which is this little city on an island in San Diego. My plan was to hang out there until sunset and then either go back until they closed or find somewhere closer to the airport to get food. While I was at the Starbucks my Dad was at the Grand Junction airport. We found out both of his flights were delayed so he was just going to be late. But his first flight kept being pushed later and later whereas his second flight switched back to on time. At one point this left him with a 6 minute layover. I started to freak out about this because it was likely the hotel wouldn’t let me check in since I’m under 16 and if my dad didn’t make it that day I would have nowhere to sleep. So I called my Aunt in San Jose to see if she knew anyone in San Diego and I called the hotel. The hotel wouldn’t let me check in and my Aunt knew a friend of a friend who has family in San Diego. However luckily my Dad’s second flight got delayed too so he landed at 10:30pm in San Diego. Because of trying to figure out options if the worst case scenario happened I didn’t see the sunset and didn’t write my blog like I hoped. That is why this blog is late because then on Sunday my dad and I did a La Jolla cave kayaking tour. It was super cool. We saw some leopard sharks, sea lions, and then Dolphins a couple of feet away from our kayak!
My dad and I on the kayak.
It was amazing. If you are ever in La Jolla do the La Jolla kayak cave tours. After lunch and some ice cream we hit the road and stayed in Las Vegas at Treasure Island. The next day we went to the Lego store for an early birthday gift for me and then left for home.
One of my Lego creations.
We finally arrived yesterday at 10 pm.
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