S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

I was always thinking how we could all get our pictures better organized. And recently I found an application on my computer that allows me to better crop pictures and to make them all consistent. So this application is really helpful and it makes everything a lot neater since we are working with different trials. Something exciting that has been happening this week. We are almost about to end our 28 day trial for plastics 4 and 6 (we still need to wait for another week for our plastics #3) but we are so close and we can finally see our results. We will be using the FTIR to see the chemical decomposition of these microplastics. Anyways I just wanted to say this has been an exciting semester, filled with so much. I have grown so much as person and I hope everyone is having a good semester!

With the end of the semester almost approaching now there are only small things that have to be done. Since one of our partners (Ibrahim) will be going to represent the pseudomonas project at University of Nevada, the poster had to be updated with the new information that was collected since we did the conference at the ASU WAESO conference back in the semester.  So getting the poster updated took some time and patience from the whole team and our awesome advisor Dr. Cotter. Now I just wish everyone good luck at the Arizona, and Nevada Science conference!

We are almost halfway done with the biodegradation process of our microplastics and Pseudomonas. At this point in the semester, it is time to go start seeing if the incubation process by using the different days is effective. This week, we will be using the FTIR machine in the Chemistry department. The first set of plastics that we will be observing will be just the treated plastics themselves. We are going to observe what kind of molecular components and how the structures of these plastics. This process is going to take it one step further, then just using the SEM, and the FTIR machine which is going to be really exciting!

This week the team had a chance to use the SEM machine one more time. We needed to get the last images for from the treated plastics that were stored in the minus 80 fridge. The images that the team observed were very outstanding. We got new images that were different from the images that were taken at the beginning. That is because the images that were taken at the beginning were just with the plastics,  and the images taken recently were combined with the different types of Pseudomonas. Next week we will finish getting the rest of the images under the SEM.