Week 6

Welcome back everyone!

This week has been very exciting for me because I got to spend a lot of time working in the lab with my on-site advisor and his lab assistants.

In one of my previous posts, I stated my anxiety over working with undergraduate seniors and being intimidated by them; however, I found out that working with them can actually be fun and helps alleviate the boring nature of research (turns out research is eighty percent cleaning and preparation and not nearly as exciting as what you see in movies). One of the lab assistants, Miguel, talked to me about college life and was the reason why I decided to apply to Arizona State University out of nowhere. He also gave me a tour of the dorms and campus after I was done for the day at the lab. Brandon, another lab assistant I worked with, talked to me about the fun side of student life at ASU and I now know which clubs to join for parties. My project at the lab is meant to be solo and the lab assistants are there to supervise my project. I learned that working solo on a research project can become boring when most of the project requires you to wait before you can move on (not like Ms. Vo’s labs where everything was fast paced and on a time crunch). If I’m going to pursue another research project in the future, I would probably do a group research rather than doing it solo.

My previous experiences with Ms. Vo’s labs did a good job at preparing me for working at ASU’s labs, but there were things that I had to learn. One, I had to learn how to work with an open flame to sterilize my materials which was fun until I accidentally tipped over the bunsen burner (which isn’t as solid as it looks) and suddenly had flames bursting at my chest. I also learned how to operate an autoclave. An autoclave is used to sterilize materials for use and biohazard waste before it is thrown out. It’s basically a giant steamer that looks like a massive oven that is inserted into the wall. I had to put on a lot of protective wear while working with the autoclave. The last skill I learned was how to use a fume hood properly. At BASIS, we used fume hoods to store waste from experiments, but they are supposed to be aseptic (free of contamination from microorganisms) environments for experiments.

Overall, working at the lab has been a fun experience so far and I will see you all next week.

- CJ Pimentel

Week 5

Hello and welcome back! I hope everyone enjoyed their Spring Break.

I spent my break coming up with a new Senior Project experiment as my last one had to be completely scrapped. It was a stressful and enlightening experience to the reality of research because I learned that a single mistake can lead to an entire project’s failure regardless of the amount to work or research that went into it beforehand. I also realized that being overly ambitious can be a problem but if you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big (just be prepared for failure).

As I was trying to come up with a new experiment, I wanted to try and address another significant problem but not have to project be too ambitious like the last one. I decided to go off of one of the concerns raised over my last project: the danger of creating new harmful bacteria in the environment. Companies today are becoming more and more reliant on biotechnology as seen with all of our genetically modified crops and animals. These are easily accessible sources for genetic information for bacteria who are able to evolve by taking in genetic material floating in the environment. We have seen infectious bacteria in the past evolve by taking in genetic material from various other species as seen with the swine flu virus evolving through the genes of pigs and birds. Today, these sources for bacteria have been improved with genes that cause them to grow and breed faster and these genes could be copied by infectious bacteria to create a deadlier new species.

My new project will look into how efficiently bacteria can take in genetic material from the environment. Unfortunately, I will not be able to look into how bacteria can copy genes from a live host. Instead, I will be looking into how efficiently can bacteria take free floating genetic material in the environment to replicate the scenario of an infectious bacteria taking genes from a dead host. For this new experiment, I will be testing common bacteria like E. coli and C. freundii because these bacteria are the ones that are most likely to evolve from the DNA of genetically modified organisms due to the fact that they are everywhere. Also, these bacteria are opportunistic and can still be infectious. For the genetic material, I will be using pGLO (the gene that makes jellyfish glow) because I can easily tell if the bacteria successfully took the gene.

Hopefully this new project will turn out well and I will see you all next week.

- CJ Pimentel

Week 4

Welcome back to the blog!

This week has been a very interesting one for me. Some good news is that my on-site advisor recovered from his pneumonia this week so I was finally able to meet him in person at ASU and hear his thoughts on my experiment. Unfortunately, more problems were raised during my meeting and my experiment had to be completely scrapped.

In my previous two posts, I talked about how seriously the government controls the experimentation of bacteria and the fact that I was not able to get access to the plasmids that I needed for my experiment (the most important and irreplaceable part). These problems came back to haunt me this week when my advisor said that he would not be able to purchase the plasmids because the government requires him to send an approved list of materials that he will be using at his lab a year in advance and the campus will not purchase any new materials that he is not using for his classes. If I were to use the plasmids in my experiment, I would have to do a lot of paperwork beforehand and gain approval from both the government and the university and I would be under constant surveillance from government officials during my experiment (my on-site advisor stated that he would be uncomfortable with having cops roaming his labs constantly). I would also have to familiarize myself with the long list of laws regarding experimentation on bacteria because if I were to unknowingly break any of those laws (i.e. if there was a breach in containment and some of the modified bacteria got out of the lab) then I would be in trouble with homeland security and be labeled as a biological terrorist.  Due to all these complications, I had to completely abandon my experiment and try to come up with a new one. The good news is that I will be able to reuse my original experiment in college.

For my new experiment, my on-site advisor gave me a list to bacteria and the pGLO plasmid to work with. The pGLO plasmid is the plasmid that makes bacteria glow under UV light (we did the same experiment in Mr. Gilbride’s biology class). My task is to make an original idea by twisting some aspect of this basic experiment. The hard part is that this experiment has been reinvented so many ways because of its simplicity and so coming up with an original idea will be a challenge. Hopefully I will have a finished plan for my new experiment soon.

Next week I will be taking a break so there will be no new posts, but I will be posting the week after about how my experiment is going. See you all next time and hope you are all having a wonderful time.

- CJ Pimentel