Week Thirteen

This week we took the plastic pieces out of the PIA plates and washed, sanitized, dried, then got our last set of measurements. Afterward, the average mass was calculated and added to the graph for comparison. We were kind of happy to see more results, but on Wednesday we were surprised to find significant differences in the margin of error. I was able to get some insight from John and, well.. I think next time I'll be sure to take a look at all possibilities (from a stats perspective) in gathering data. And it's not that we chose a bad way to collect data, but there are better ways and its good to really look into other possibilities while building your foundation. For now, there's not much to do about it but trudge through it.

The beginning process of taking out the plastic pieces from PIA
and washing, then sanitizing them and drying in beakers.

Week Twelve

Last week, we noted bacterial growth from the plastic pieces collected for month 3. We streaked them on MacConkey agar. The goal was to verify our gram stain results, as growth on Mac plates would help further indicate that the bacteria are gram-negative, bacilli. And something interesting that I learned is that the MAC agar will have a color change reaction. When I first saw them they were a distinguishable red/purple color. And I learned that the plates can change depending on the microbe living on it. It can go from its original red color to a clear/yellow, because the agar is made of pH indicator and lactose... cool stuff :P

Week Eleven

This week we attended the ASU undergraduate research symposium. It was a great experience! We presented our research to a few people who walked by. I felt nervous at times and blanked. But my lab partners were there to back me up and give me feedback. We did an awesome job, I'm thankful for having them as lab partners.
We met Dr. Marshall as well and a couple of previous PC Train interns. One of them was able to give me a little information about her research experience at ASU. It was also inspiring to read through the various research topics out there. A lot of people at the symposium had some interesting research projects. There's so much that we have yet to learn and explore. I look forward to being a research intern at ASU next fall.

Week Ten

It looks like we’re nearing the end of the semester.

This week we kept busy working on the poster. Good thing that we have our abstract, background of study and data. It’s just editing, making sense of the data and transferring the information over. I’m working on the table and graph for the results. We have the mass for the six different types of plastics, that have been submerged in the aquarium tank (with canal water). We were hoping to see a difference in mass as our research questions the deterioration of plastics. We kind of all agreed that if we had more time, we’d probably have more data to work with and be able to really distinguish a difference in mass over time. But we have to work with what we can. 

If anyone has any helpful tips on the poster making process please let me know.

Bar graph of the average mass of each plastics type, from month 0 to month 2.