Met with Dr. Dana Wang

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Earlier in the week, Maria discovered that we had some contamination with one type of our plastic and with TSB broth. So we have tested the media and we want to figure out what could have caused such contamination. It could be many different factors we must look into.
Also today we met with professor Dr. Wang and we were able to go over the FTIR graphs that we collected from our project. She was very knowledgeable and she was able to explain a lot of doubts that my team and I had. By using the IR graphs we were able to determine that the bacteria were indeed able to colonize our plastic disks, which is just another confirmation that we can add to the list to prove that these microplastics are able to colonize. Also something interesting that we were able to come to some conclusion is the functional group C-Cl that we found in some of our graphs, Dana was able to analyze and see a difference in that bond. But because where that functional group is located on the spectra, on some of the graphs it wasn't shown so we are going to redo some of the FTIR analysis and expand the graph on the x-axis to have a more clear idea on how where the functional group C-Cl is and we will be able to measure the intensities.
At this point in our project, we have very interesting quantitative and qualitative data to be able to say that Pseudomonas species does colonize microplastics, and hopefully in the future very soon we will be able to confirm biodegradation as well.

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