So this week was mostly defined by transitions. Our batch reactor's finally reached their stable population so we took them and put the reactor into chemostat. Where batch reactor's have nothing going in or out (technically) and are used to watch change over time, chemostat reactors have influent and effluent moving at the same rate. This means that nothing changes: the population is constant, as is the amount of ammonia, nitrite, etc. The reactor is going to spend two weeks stabilizing in chemostat and then the real interesting stuff will begin. Even though I won't be there for it, the next step will be disturbance, or increased feed chemostat. In this phase, the bacteria will be subject to one hour of ammonia loading. Our strain, Nitrosomonas eutropha, is known to prefer larger quantities of ammonia as compared to its N. europa cousins, and hopefully this means that it produces NO and N20 gases differently (i.e. less of them.) However, this ammonia loading will require hourly testing for 12-15 hours every day, so I'm not completely heartbroken to be missing it. After those two weeks, tests will be done to see if the bacteria retained any of the previous traits.
We will be testing for the next few days to get baselines for ammonia, nitrite, hydroxalimine, and some mRNA stuff as well. We will also be creating our own standard curves for the aforementioned chemicals because we are finally getting into work that could be publish-able. Next week I will also be working on some poster drafts to present to Medini and Dr. Chandran.
In the past week, there has been an influx of people coming to the lab, including high school students, and new grad students. (Very thankful that I've had my own desk this whole time.)
Although I can't stick around any longer, I look forward to periodically seeing how this project develops and maybe working with Medini again.
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