Week 5 at the Donohue Lab

Hi this is Meg and I’ll be talking about my fifth week working at the Donohue Lab at Duke. This week has been far less busy than the 2 weeks before. We still have to census every day. However, many of the plate have begun to plateau, meaning that nothing new is germinating. As a result, there are less and less plates to census every day.

In addition to censusing, Lien had to hand in a rough draft for her poster on Wednesday, and her proposal on Friday. As a result, Bri, Tarek, and Lien have been working hard analyzing Lien’s data and attempting to clean it up.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I helped clean some of Lien’s data. Often after the data is compiled, there is a problem with the order, meaning that an earlier day has a higher number of germinants than a later day, which is impossible since we don’t remove seeds that have germinated. Therefore each successive day should have the same amount or a greater amount of germinated seeds than the previous day. In order to fix this, we attempted to modify the least amount of data as possible. This meant trying to only change one day’s data. However, a couple of times the data was just too out of order to fix. As a result, it couldn’t be used and we had to throw that data away.

Data that needs to be cleaned. Each column represents the day the data is from. The highlighted row is an example of data that needs to be cleaned since on day 3, there were 14 germinated seeds and on day 4, there were 10. Similarly later in the same data, on day 6 there were 14, and on day 7 there were 11. 

Although this week has been a lot slower than I’m used to, it’s been nice to have a bit of a break, especially since my lab manager has been letting me leave earlier than usual. However, hopefully it picks up a little bit so that I’m still fairly active in the lab.