A truly wonderful summer experience

This summer research experience funded by Center for student innovation had been wonderful and is truly one to keep. Working with various students and lecturers from different department has enable new social network of skills and information sharing to me. One thing for sure, my ASL signing skill has improved a lot and so are my laboratory skills. Thank you all for supporting and encouraging me.

Week 8

This week had been the most busiest week due to the water sampling and phenol analysis. Everyday starting from last week Wednesday i sampled water from various duckweed cultures treatments. These water sample were then analyzed on Monday and Thursday for phenol concentration. All the duckweed full treatment cultures were put to stop based on treatment. Natural organic matter cultures final sampling and biomass was done on Friday, Tannic acid cultures on Saturday and Phenol was done today (Sunday). Water sample collected on these day will also be analyzed for phenol concentration. This is done to observe the changes of phenol concentration in the presence of duckweed. If the phenol concentration decreases, this will mean that duckweed has the potential to purify water from phenol.

Wetland sampling

Wetland is an area where the land is wet at certain period of the year and dry at another. It is also being characterized with the vegetation around the land. Here at RIT, there are several wetlands surrounding the campus, these include both natural and constructed wetlands. As a collaboration project between both the imaging science and environmental science, the Imaging Science teams and the Environmental Science teams did a SpecTIR wetland survey at 55 sites across 2 natural and 2 constructed wetland around RIT. This survey started at 7.30 am this morning and ended at exactly 7.30pm. The wetland survey field work was finished at 4.45pm but then we continued with some sorting out and in lab spectral measurement.

It was an amazing experience and the hard work was worth it.

Week 7 - The full treatment experiment set up

After several meetings and discussions with my mentors, i set up the last experiment which is the full treatment experiment for analyzing Tannic acid, phenol and Natural organic matter effects on duckweed growth and how duckweed affect the amount/concentration of these dissolved organic matter in the water. The experiment was set up on three different days according to treatments and these experiments will run for 10days total.

These are the pictures taken from the growth chamber.

Wednesday Photo session and wetland site set up

Today the aquatic ecology research group members went out to set up permanent sampling sites at a wetland in RIT. We worked from 8am to 10 am moving concrete and lumber to the site to build a steady plot for sampling. Later in the afternoon i had a photo session with Qian and my mentors. I also replenished the Microcystis aeruginosa culture medium and did some acid wash (cleaning the glassware). Tomorrow i will be working at the lab over at the NTID building. Megan and I will be working on the folin analysis for my water samples.

Autoclave machine leaking

The autoclave machine i have been using to make the growth media for my plant cultures was leaking and need to be fixed before i could use it again. So today, i used a smaller autoclave machine that i borrowed from Dr Buckley. It was smaller so less growth media could be autoclaved at once. I'm hoping that the autoclaved machine would be fixed soon or it would be very troublesome.

Random Pictures from the incubator

Figure1: Aquatic plant stock cultures

Figure2: Selenastrum culture

Figure3: Duckweed stockcultures

Figure4: High concentration of Microcystis aeruginosa

Figure5: Cladophora cultures