S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

Fig. 1 One of the images that was edited and placed in our posters. It shows the bacteria I was working on which is Pseudomonas aeruginosa,  When I left school Friday afternoon I thought I was going to have a regular easy going weekend. Usually, on my weekends I work from 7am to 3pm, so my whole morning is occupied working. With just a few days away from the 2018 WAESO Conference there was a lot of preparing to do for our posters Like I was saying I thought the posters were all set for the conference... I thought wrong. During the week there was so much editing to do with the posters. Every little tedious detail had to be just right, and that is what made this project a little harder. Do not get me wrong, in the end when I looked at the final edition of what was going to be printed the team and I felt so proud! All of our hard work finally paid off! Now I have to start preparing for my presentation, for the actual conference on Friday! Exciting!!

This week consisted of getting ready with the team for the WAESO conference next week! We all decided to sign up for the WAESO Student Research Conference 2018. This week we have been really crunched for time because there is so much to do in so little time, as always. But that does not stop me. I have been working really hard to make this poster look presentable before we have to submit to the printers. I have to do tedious things like editing pictures, making sure they are all the same size, etc. I am also making sure there are no typos of any sort and I have to make sure the pictures we do use are good quality to print! The deadline for the completed poster is by the end of this week so on Friday. So far I have made great progress, I am excited how everything is going to turn out in the end.

In this weeks lab time with the team, the main goal was to try to weigh out 15 mg of each microplastic into four different glass tubes. It may look easier than it looks but it did take a lot of weighing that included taking away and adding plastics which was a struggle at first. We did take a while at first because our first protocol was to measure out the plastics inside the tube and then weighing it that way. This was taking way too long because we think that there might be some debris that went out of the tube. This may seem like such an easy task to do, but it took so long because there was no control and the balance was not cooperating either. We were there for a good hour trying to just weigh out the first plastic #3.  Then we decided to just tare out a weighing boat onto the balance and add the plastics that way. This was a lot more effective and it took less the time, we even managed to get on plastic to weigh exactly 15 mg, (shown in the picture above) which was awesome

Just like any researcher this week consisted of lots of waiting time. Our experiment consisted of making sure the different types of plastics we were working with were as treated and bacteria free as possible. How this was done was by using 100% isopropyl alcohol. Then once that was added to each plastic we had the fume evaporate off the plastic just to have all the plastics on the bottom. During the week, we wanted to test if these plastics where alcohol treated properly, so in order to test for that we put each set of plastic put on a PIA, PF, and LB plates to see if anything was growing on these plastics. These plated were incubated for one day and the next day when I went back to the lab to take pictures all the plates were just the plastic itself, nothing growing on them or around them, which is a very good thing because that is exactly what we wanted. Now that we know that the plastics are treated, we can proceed on measuring plastics with the actual pseudomonas inside.

During this week, after debating if I should continue my research with the biodegradation of microplastics using different types of Pseudomonas. I have decided that to stick with the same protocol and procedures. The project was not completely finished at the end of Fall semester, so that is one of the main reasons I did not want to just leave the project on the side and start on a new one. I really wanted to finish what I started. Especially, because the next step of my project is really exciting. Last semester consisted of just coming up with the protocol. Now that that is set and done, we can now apply that to actually getting some crucial data and really important images on the SEM that can help with determining biodegradation. So this whole week consisted of getting my schedule set for the whole semester and seeing what days Dr. Cotter, Ibrahim and I could get together and what times we will be using the SEM microscope to start the second part of our experiment. This week als