It’s been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened since then! Shortly after my last post, unfortunately, despite having adopted preventive measures, all the cultures for one species of algae that I was growing once again became cross-contaminated. While my PI did inform me that it was not a big deal and that the invasive cells should die off, and the cross contamination didn’t appear to be hindering cell growth and in one of the cultures, I ended up throwing out the affected cultures. Here’s why: fast forward another two weeks and I received bad news from my PI that because I did not have enough algae cells in all of my algae cultures, I would not be able to test the algae for carbohydrate, protein, and most importantly, fatty acid composition. In all honesty, it was a crushing blow on top of all the previous mishaps that I encountered, as that was the main reason why I wanted to work in my PI’s lab. However, there were a couple of silver linings.
While my main project has been derailed, my PI has allowed me to continue cultivating my cultures so that I can collect more data. However, I have had to discard half of my cultures, so that I would have time to help Brendon with his project. This is another reason why the cross-contaminated cultures were tossed. My PI was kind enough to allow me to join Brendon’s, my close lab partner’s, project on researching algae as a source of Beta-carotene and lutein, which are used in pharmaceuticals. Kudos to Brendon for letting me jump onboard as well. We spent the latter half of last week preparing his algae samples for testing this coming week by freeze drying his samples and extracting the beta-carotenes and lutein out of them. Just as I had done in my project, Brendon’s algae were cultivated in different kinds of water. Hence, the goal of his project is to see whether that has any effect on the amount of beta-carotene and lutein his algae produced. To determine the amount of these substances, we will be using High-Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), which is kind of like a photo-spectrometer with a few extra features.
Here is a picture of it:
Brendon and I will be running his samples through this chromatograph as the testing process takes a while to complete. If you include setting it up and going through additional runs for blanks and for cleaning out its innards, the process takes a few hours. As such, there is a strong likelihood that we will be unable to go through all of his samples before I depart. Nevertheless, he has offered to send me the results once he is done, which is very kind of him.
Looking ahead to my last few days in Temasek Polytechnic, I hope to be able to contribute adequately to Brendon’s project as I don’t want to seem like I am mooching off his efforts thus far. While it hasn’t been the smoothest of journeys, I hope that I will be able to end my stint there well and put myself in a good position for my poster and future presentations.
P.S.: I brought some muffins to work today and they turned out to be a big hit!
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