Week 12

It is almost that time of the year!! That time when you start finishing up collecting your data, writing your paper, and preparing for the final presentation. If anyone is wondering how my research is going. Well, let’s say that it could be worse. I am collecting my data by measuring Optical density of my sample every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So far, the data isn’t that good for the entire sample. Unfortunately, I am having very slow growth rate for 2 samples and no growth another. I know that there must be a mistake that I made, but I can’t seem to figure out what I did wrong. I

Anyway, I hope everyone has a great Thanks giving vacation!! (And good luck black Friday shopping)

Various Algae Samples

Week 11

The other day I realized that there was some interesting white foam in one of my algal containers. I didn’t seem to be air bubbles from aeration. I am almost 100% certain that it was contamination. Fortunately, the presumed contaminated algae culture was an old culture that I wasn’t collecting any data from. Nevertheless, I was very concern. Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do besides adding more algae media.  I thought that maybe I could promote algae growth, and that would eliminate the contamination. I gave it a try, and guess what?? I checked on that same algal culture today, and there wasn’t any white foam!!

I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t contamination, but at least it’s gone. 

White foam is gone!!

Week 10

I am never satisfied with my performance, and this stresses me out a lot. I don't know if anyone else feels like that, but it drives me crazy. I am starting to feel very frustrated with my project, because there is so many things I wish I could do different or expand on. Honestly, I am doing the best I can with the resources that I have.

Today I started new  algal cultures, because I am going to start recording the optical density, and get my data from this new cultures. I also received my control TODAY. I am going to be using Chlorella as my control. Okay, the idea is that Chlorella is a well known algae strain (used for biofuel), and I could compare the absorbency of Chlorella to the absorbency of the four algae strains I have. There is some research that optical density can be used to quantify growth.  There other better methods of quantifying growth, but due to lack of resources (and time constrain), optical density is the way to go. I am only going to be collecting data for three weeks (basically right before project is due). This would give me some data to present. Next week, I want to blog about the mistakes (which were many),and lessons I learned up to this point. 

Honestly, algae is pretty cool, and I hope more research is done on it, but I will not continue my research next semester. I am moving on to something that I find a bit more interesting...

CO2 REDUCTION!!! 

So the algae is growing, and that is a good thing (I guess), but then I have a huge problem. The problems is that I started off with 50ml of water sample (from each source), but I had no idea the algae concentration in each sample. I realized this was a problem after I did some research (and some thinking), but didn't know how I could fix this. I talked with Josh and he had some good suggestions. He suggested that I could use a similar method he did when he worked in a chemical company.

The procedure Josh suggested works really well when you have a homogenous solution, and my algae might not be completely homogenous, but it is very close to that. Anyway, I have to talk to Anil about it, and see if he thinks it is a good idea or not. We have five weeks for the semester to be over, and I am not pressure at all (a bit of sarcasm there). Hope everyone's projects is going well, and have spectacular weekend!!!