Week 1- Carrot Tea!

This week I arrived in Madras to start my internship at the Branch Experimental Station. I was excited to start out the summer in beautiful Central Oregon!

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Overlooking part of the experimental fields

One of the first projects that I got to work on after arriving was looking at how different treatments affected  seed-born carrot disease. First, we took carrot seeds that had the seed-born disease and separated them into giant tea bags. We had four different sections: orange, yellow, green, and teal.11269598_737379793038119_931856486_n Each color section underwent the eight treatments: Non-treated, Hot water, Sporekill, PT81, FT33, KleenGrow, Oxidate, and Bleach.

11667240_737365719706193_1075150576_nWe put all of the different trial solutions into mason jars and “brewed” the tea bags in the solutions to wet the seeds. It felt (and smelled) like we were making carrot tea!11667990_737365739706191_2044955190_nAfter the seeds had been ran through each of the solutions, they were carefully cut open and the seeds were laid out to dry underneath the hood. The hood pulls in air from the room, cleans it, and then pushes it over the work station. This made sure that the air going over the seeds was free of other bacteria that could contaminate them. 11651093_737365536372878_762018196_n

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Trial #3: Sporekill!
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Trial #8: Poor bleached seeds

After the seeds had dried, they were put back into envelopes and divided up into two sections. The larger portion was used for soaking the seeds in a phosphate buffer, which allows bacteria to live more successfully. 11650671_737364963039602_98377775_nThe phosphorous-bacteria solution was placed into petri dishes containing a semi-selective media. Each trial from each color was put into 10 petri dishes. That’s a total of 320 petri dishes!

11667147_737365399706225_1121726482_nTo plate the bacteria, a pipette was used to place the solution onto the dishes. Small glass beads were also put into the dishes. Shaking the dish back and forth moved the beads, which evenly deposited the bacteria over the media.11693078_737365333039565_2088373478_nThe second reserved section of the seeds was used for germination. Filter papers were placed into the dish along with water. 25 seeds were placed into a 5×5 grid in each dish.11696710_737364929706272_1733750997_n

This was repeated 4 times for each trial of each color for a total of 128 grids.11668218_737364916372940_711606797_nNow we wait and see how our bacteria grow and how the seeds germinate for each of the different trials!