J/18 July 2012

Day Eighteen

(9:30 am) As there was no lab supervisor yesterday the team returns to labs this morning to try evaporating off acetone which has actually dissolved a small amount of polystyrene. This involves using a heat block in the fume cupboard then seeing if the disslved polystyrene is a powder or back in beads like before. Unfortunately our lab supervisor is away this morning as well so the team relocated to the computer room to do research and plan the meeting for the afternoon.

(14:00 pm) The team plus this weeks supervisor met up in one of the meeting rooms in the building. At this point all of the options were discussed and a plan was formed for the following few days.

(15:00 pm) A couple of members were taken to a microbiology lab to see if some Pseudomonas aeruginosa could be aquired for use. Unfortunately the researcher using Pseudomonas was out so the only thing that could be done was to produce some more plates for the bacteria to be placed on.

(16:30 pm) A few of the plates were finished but the team was told the researcher had come back so a few went back to his lab and he agreed to plate up the control, 5% polystyrene and 10% polystyrene plates with 5 different strains of Pseudomonas so the bacteria could start to grow and any results can be seen before plating up the CSE kits.