S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

On Novemeber 16, I went on a adventurous hiking trip with some of the TRAIN scholars. It was really fun. The drive up to Sedona was beautiful, as always. I even got to do some studying on the way for my organic chemistry class. The hike overall was a new experience. I never knew how much I really needed a relaxing hike like that. We got to see a few wildlife which was the whole purpose of it, and the weather was just lovely! I highly encourage for anyone to go, can not wait to jump onto an experience like this again.

Being in Organic Chemistry, the second semester, I have had a lot of experience using the FTIR for almost all of my labs throughout the year. So it was exhilarating that yesterday I was able to bring along Amanda and Maria and use it on our samples. They got the chance to see how the FTIR works and see how easy and efficient it is to use. We were able to finally get some quantitative data on our plastic samples and Dana, my organic chemistry professor is helping us with analyzing the IR graphs that we are receiving which are helping us a lot. Next up we decided that we are sort of curious what reading the FTIR will pick up if we were to analyze the plastic samples from last semester with actual Pseudomonas species co-incubated into the plastic. So hopefully we will be able to get those results next week.

This week the team and I have been treating our circle uniformed microplastics with alcohol. Once the microplastics are completely dried, they were placed on PIA, PF, and TSA plates to test for contamination. So far, only PP, Plastic #5 has been tested and PVC, Plastic #3 has also been examined. Both have shown no sign of contamination which is a good thing, and it means that we are able to continue on with our next phase of the experiment which is to start the incubation step over the winter break that is coming up. However, we are still waiting on LDPE, Plastic #4 to dry from the alcohol that was used to treat it. At the moment, it is still not dry, so we are waiting for that to happen then, after that is done we can place them on PIA, PF, and TSA plates and make sure there is no contamination on Plastic #4, if that is the case then we will be able to start the co-incubation process.

After waiting for what seemed like an eternity the plastics PVC, PP, and LDPE are finally in. Thanks to Amber, one of the techs in the biosciences department, she was able to find us some heavy duty punch pliers to get uniformed 1/4in in diameter plastics. This is really going to help us so much in getting a more accurate reading when we start the incubation process for a more extended period of days. The primary goal is to get these plastics cut up as soon as possible and alcohol-treated so that way they will be free of contamination. I was going to help cut out some plastics today, but unfortunately, I hurt my hand and I would have not been really helpful because I heard needs a lot of power to get this plastics cut! Hopefully next week I will get my fair share of getting to cut some. But as of right now that is where the team stands. I cannot wait to start the incubation process because we have some new techniques and ways that we are going to that this time around.