Third Bio Blog Post November 16, 2009
Posted by RhyanVillanueva in Uncategorized.3 comments
What I have learnt?
During the past months, I was able to experience how the life of a researcher was like. I learnt a lot of things: like how caffeine is degraded, the benefits of its application, different laboratory techniques, organizing the data and to make technical reports, among others.
What barriers and challenges I have faced on the start of the project? How have you overcome those barriers and challenges? What are your goals for next semester?
First of all, when I started on the Microbial and Biochemical Laboratory I was an amateur with the research on progress. So I did not know what type of experiments I have to realize. My reaction was to soak myself onto all the topics related to understand more-in-depth. I even asked for previous presentations, I participate on meetings in which I asked a lot! Another thing was to get use to the location of the instruments in the lab, at first I was always searching for the instruments. But as I spent more time in the lab I was able to resolve that problem.
Using research papers, I was able to use other experiment data to my research saving a lot of time. But recently, I have had some problems with the microorganism used. Basically, I schedule or run an experiment in which I wanted to test the degradation of caffeine with different fungi. I wanted to run the experiment as much as close to the literature, in which they counted 106 spores per mL. The problem is that the fungi cells are not creating any spore at all. As part of the goals for next semester I want to resolve the spore’s problem. My hypothesis is that the organism is under very comfortable conditions for its growth, so it does not need to produce spores. I want to submit it onto more extreme conditions, like low nutrients and colder temperatures. So, one of my objectives for next semester is to look for the conditions in which the fungi cells develop sufficient amount of spores.
After visiting all of the blogs assigned, I have seem that they contain researches with important applications for today’s society. Laura del Valle, is making research trying to resolve a very interesting and important topic: what if the probiotics that we consume are causing an antibiotic resistant with different pathogens? However, Xyomara Castillo is conducting research to try came up with correlations between growth factors in front of colorectal cancer, which is a big problem for our society. On the other hand, Nerymar Ortiz has a research based on the transformation of hemoglobin into another type called myoglobin, that it is very inefficient carrying oxygen. I can tell that a healthy population needs to have a lot of research and development, and all of the Bio-minds are making the difference. I feel very proud to be part of it.
