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This week was hectic to say the least. In the beginning of the week I've been fine tuning my project, and yesterday I worked on designing the ENTIRE experimental procedure for the summer, and worked on planning out the rest of my time here at MBARI. Right now my work time is booked with sampling, growing cultures, determining growth rates, making artificial sea water and media, inoculating cells with media, and the list just goes on and on. My project this summer will primarily focus on what the range of nutrient stoichiometry of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (C:N ratio) for two strains of Micromonas (PCC 299 and CCMP 1545). This will hopefully provide much needed empirical data that is currently lacking in the field.

This project is challenging, but I'm looking forward to learning new molecular techniques, as well as enhancing old ones. I'm also excited to do my own little project for once, and to be apart of the full process,  including experimental design, data analysis, trouble shooting, and all the technical work in between.

I don't know if I've been adding my confluence comments in right since I can see the one from last time right above this one and no one else's. Anyways, last week I spent most of my time interpreting data from the previous week. The previous week I did a temperature experiment with CCMP 1545 to figure out which temperature (16 degrees Celsius or 21 degrees Celsius) it grew best at, but the experiment was a waste because I only managed to get three time points and the 16 degree incubator kept fluctuating it's temperature. We're getting a new 16 degree incubator, so I'm looking forward to repeating the experiment and seeing what happens. I also did a dilution experiment with RCC 299 to see what dilution it was able to tolerate, from my data it looks like it can grow to at least a minimum of 60,000 cells/mL which is pretty impressive considering that that isn't very concentrated at all. I've also been keeping up with my 14 flasks for my preliminary experiment which will determine which Nitrogen and Phosphorus depleted media to use for my big experiment I'm planning on starting next week when my mentor comes back.