My name is Anna Piwowar, and I am currently working at Dr. Kartik Chandran's lab at Columbia University, working with ammonia oxidzing bacteria in batch reactors and studying their kinetics.
This week began with Medini and I cleaning out the reactors and setting them up for a new cycle. Between rinsing and autoclaving, it was a lengthy process. We had to overcome many problems (pieces that didn't fit, screws that had to be unscrewed, and everything in between). Finally, we thought we would be ready to inoculate our sparkling clean reactors and begin looking at cell growth. However, problems kept cropping up, and Murphy's Law held true: everything that could go wrong did. *(Not everything did go wrong, yet. So I don't want to jinx anything but we are still able to move forward with the process.) The DO (Dissolved Oxygen) probe on one of the reactors was found to be defunct, so now we are in the process of ordering a new one (and they do not come cheap). We do have the one reactor working properly enough for the time being, and hopefully we'll start collecting data on cell growth and nitrite formation.
While the process goes, I have a lot of time to read. Medini has many textbooks to offer me, and on Tuesday it was all about studying reactors, all the types and the equations. Sadly, I lack the Calculas to understand some of the things, but after an arduous tutoring session with Medini, I understand what the kinetics are and what we need and why.
By the end of the week we decided to go forward with the second reactor without the DO probe, and instead opting to manually find the dissolved oxygen. Even though we can't have simultaneous growth, we will at least have two sets of data.
The third week was all about data collection. We went forward with the second reactor, and now we're just working on maintaining the reactors and improving my laboratory skills. My PI is out a lot, but I will be meeting with him soon to talk about other things I might pursue for my last few weeks here.
Other than that, Columbia is beautiful, especially with the cooler weather, and having the chance to travel around Manhatten is wonderful.
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