Week 10

Week 10 brought this internship to a close. This week, we got to work on some sunflowers that had been growing outside.

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First, we made a spore solution using spores that had been collected from a petri plate on which they were growing. We also had some diluted potassium chloride to spray on the sunflowers that weren’t getting treated with the spore solution.

 

All of the potassium chloride treatments got covered up so that they wouldn’t get any of the spore solution on them.

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Spore solution…

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Direct hit!

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After applying this treatment, we were going to wait and see if the spore treated plants developed a pinkish residue that had been found on some other sunflowers, to see if those spores caused that problem.

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This internship was such a great experience and I am very thankful that I got this opportunity to work with and learn so much from everybody!

Week 9

 

During this internship, we extracted a lot of DNA from various samples. In week 9, I was able to take some pictures of how we obtained those samples.

 

The first step is to put a large cube of the agar into a flask containing a broth…

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Then the flasks are put onto a shaker that spins the broth and agar around. We left them like this for about a week.

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We waited until enough growth had occurred to harvest it…

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Then we strained the flasks, collecting the tissue in autoclaved filter paper.

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We then pressed the excess water out of the tissue. It kind of looked like (not appetizing) cheese!

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It got put into tubes that were then sealed with kim wipes and parafilm.

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Into the freezer they went! Afterwards they were lyophilized and then used for DNA extractions.

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