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.

Last week our team already started the incubation on only Plastics 4 and 5, only because our Plastic 3 was contaminated with some sort of mold. We had to treat it 3 times, and then finally it was fully treated. This issue has brought our incubation process some delays because we have already started the other incubations before the other plastics. It is not that big of a deal, but it just puts us behind a little. That is fine it gives us time and separation when we have to separate the different plastics in different times, they will not be all at once. Hopefully, tomorrow we will finally have plastic #3 incubated with the different types of Pseudomonas and this will initiate the start of all the biodegradations steps started.

Before the spring break started the goal was to get a set of fresh new plastics treated and disinfected. So the Friday before the spring break we grated as much plastic as possible, and we even had some people donate some plastics for our project because the drill we used was having some issues. We then drained them in 100% isopropanol and let them air dry inside the hood to allow them to be ready for after the break. When we came back the plastics were then tested on PIA plated to see if there was any contamination in them before we could start the incubation process. Plastic #3 did show signs of slight contamination so they were treated one more time to see if we could get rid of it and actually start our next step next week.

Now that the WAESO conference is out of the way, our group can now focus on the next step of our project. Our biggest project now is starting the biodegradation process with our different types of microplastics and  Pseudomonas species.  Before we started any measuring, some preparation had to be done. We must shred more plastics to work with and we decided to incubate a fresh set of  Pseudomonas species. After all the preparation is completed then we can start the biodegradation process and we will finally get to measure if the different types of Pseudomonas species can aid in the biodegradation of microplastics in water. This experiment will consist of a lot of variables and patience, but I am hoping, in the end, it will be worth it.