Peddie EXP 2017

And just like that, my seven and a half weeks at Temasek Polytechnic are over! While my EXP summer internship wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be, it was through this experience that I learned many valuable lessons and that I will be sure to bring back to Peddie. I also got to meet some amazing people, whom I can now hang out with when I come back here in future. I still have some work cut out for me during the rest of the time I have in Singapore, and for that matter, the rest of the summer, as I am still awaiting some results from the lab to come through. However, looking back, I am in a much better position now than I was in a couple weeks ago. I would like to thank Dr. Wuang for allowing me to join her research group for the past summer, as well as Mr. Sham and Dr. Peretz for their support in the months leading up to the internship. Thank you to my supervisor Pok Siang for his guidance, and Kit Lun for giving me a hand when I needed it. Shout out to all the folks back...

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 ...

As one may infer from the title of this post, things have not gone as planned during the past week. I discovered last Monday morning that majority of my algae cultures were unfortunately contaminated. For half them, or rather all the cultures for one species of algae that I was growing, they were cross-contaminated with algae of a different species, that was being grown in the other three cultures. Of the remaining cultures that were not cross-contaminated, two were instead contaminated with microorganisms that originated from the last culture. As such, I have to restart my experiment. However, instead of using the exact same species of algae, I will be swapping out one of them for another species of algae. Restarting the experiment is going to take a few days though, as I will be reusing the bottles that I had used to cultivate my previous batch of algae. But, I have been given permission by my PI to carry out the experiment as planned at the start: cultivate the algae for som...

I spent the most part of this week conducting daily tests on my algae cultures just as I had done last week. Only this time, I had to carry out testing for six algae cultures as opposed to the three that I had last time around. This is because I managed to establish three Chollera algae cultures, which is part of my main project, of tracking the growth of two different kinds of algae being grown in three different kinds of media. These include water from a tank with catfish, or simply catfish water, wastewater from reverse osmosis, or RO reject for short, and a control solution. I must say, the Chollera cultures are looking a lot better (greener) compared to the first three Spirulina algae cultures that I set up! I did have to learn a new way of counting the Chollera cells as required of my cell count test, which gives an estimate of the concentration of cells within each algae culture, and figure out how much to dilute my Chollera test solutions in order to obta...

The expression "expect the unexpected" comes to mind when describing the one and a half weeks that I have spent so far at Temasek Polytechnic. When I arrived at the lab on my first day I was expecting to meet my supervisor right away for my lab orientation. Instead, I met Pak Siong, my supervisor, only an hour later. In all fairness, Pak Siong is a very busy man, maybe even too busy. I can probably say the same about my PI Dr. Wuang since I hardly see either of them around the lab that I am working in. Nevertheless, Pak Siong has been doing his best to accommodate whatever questions I have, and on or two occasions, has even given me a helping hand. During the first few days, I was attached to another intern Bradon, who is a final year student at Temasek Polytechnic. He has already been at the lab for some time and would be the one to show me ropes. I consider him being the one whom I am closest to at the lab, considering that not only do we get along well, but both of u...