J/16 July 2012

Day Sixteen

(10:30 am) The team that was here in the early morning had a quick briefing, and decided to get the minimal media ready. The ingredients used was exactly the same as used in the reference paper. This gave Chris some trouble trying to measure out the the salts, with some of them being only 0.001 grams per litre of water. This equates to 1 grain of salt in the container.

(12:00 pm) The agar has been autoclaved, and is now sat in the hybridizer waiting for our polystyrene to get crushed to be stirred into it. The polystyrene is proving to be very resilient and is resolving our focus to help degrade it.

(14:00 pm) The polystyrene has been frozen at -80oC for almost 2 hours in an attempt to freeze then smash it into a powder. It didn't work, but several references were found that temperatures of -130-150oC will then freeze it to a more brittle form that will then easily be smashed and can be used as a powder dissolved into the agar.

(16:15 pm) One of the other supervisors took pity on the team at this point so helped us out with a case of liquid nitrogen. However even flash freezing some of the polystyrene sugar in liquid nitrogen (approx -180oC), then smashing the beads with a pestle and mortar made no change at all. Even using polystyrene dissolved in acetone then frozen will not be broken into smaller pieces, it just goes flat.