Charlie Ung
Well, it’s another long for the undergraduate research students as we did a lot during the day. During lecture today, our guest speaker named Dr. Tanner gave us a discussion about microorganisms in the lakes and ponds of Oklahoma. It was interesting learning about his works in researching microorganisms from ponds and how we shouldn’t fear the bacteria in them. Our next speaker, Dr. Callaghan, gave us a discussion about hydrocarbons and how they corrode pipelines that causes leaks. After lecture, we went on a field trip to a meat-testing facility in Oklahoma City. The owner of the facility gave us a tour of how they operate inside the lab and how they test meat. Not only did we learn something from that trip, but we also were given an opportunity to work for him in the near future after he gave us his business card. He was really awesome guy. After the trip, we went to lab putted antibiotics onto our microorganisms. After that, we spent the next several hours learning how to use programs which involved in DNA sequencing and others. It was a load for us to learn and we had a hard time keeping up with our professor. Our good friend and tutor, Blake Stamps, had told us that he was now leaving us now for good to go back to Texas to visit his family. We will truly miss him.
Najuma Maharjan
Very very extremely sad day and second longest day of doing research. Sad in a way that Blake left us to see his family. I really miss him. He is the best TA I have ever met in my life till date. I wish him luck and really appreciate his help and patience with students. As usual, our day started off with Dr. Tanner’s talk on funny incidents during sewage treatment plant and anaerobic hydrocarbon degradation by Amy Callaghan. Both of them were interesting and knowledgeable. After lecture, we went to Aeigis laboratories in OKC. This was the neat trip so far. The manager of lab gave us a tour of how the things work. For instance, receiving samples, samples testing, processing and all. He also offered us to do an internship and even apply for job anytime. Then, we headed back to our OU lab and started working on DNA sequencing and processing. We spent hours and hours using that program and had real hard time downloading things on our laptops. But finally we did it. We will be continuing the same data analysis tomorrow. Definitely missed Blake through entire lab
Patricia Pace
Dr Tanner came today to speak about an undergraduate project he had done on the lakes of Oklahoma. He was interesting and I learned a lot about science from him. It is interesting to learn of all the resistant bacteria in the Oklahoma water ways. I would really attend to take a class taught by Dr Tanner. I also listened to a lecture by Dr Callaghan. She spoke about hydrocarbon degradation. Hydrocarbons are surprisingly hard to degrade and require an enzyme to form an intermediate.
We also visited Aeigis Laboratories and spoke with Danny O. He gave us a tour of the facilities and told us how they process their samples. He gave us information regarding jobs in the science field and the types of questions employers will ask.
We then went to the lab and used our sequences we found some programs that allowed us to compare our results to national databases to find what bacteria we have. This was a lengthy process that took several hours. We also prepared Mueller-Hinton plates with the bacteria from our TSB MPN tubes. We then added antibiotic disks to look for antibiotic resistance.
This was one long day. But I had a lot of fun.
Sushma Ale
It was in the afternoon today before Blake left the lab for good. It was pretty sad highlight of the day. The other highlights were: tour to the AEGIS food testing laboratories (very very very interesting tour by Danny G. Orozco), data sequencing and data analysis on finchTv.com, and some entertainment with Dr. Stevenson three kids. Today was one of my favorite days so far, really enjoyed all part besides Blake leaving us. over all, a 5star day!
What an exhausting day. I don’t know if it was because I am tired or because we didn’t leave til 10pm. The speakers this morning were pretty interesting. I enjoyed listening to Ralph Tanner’s lecture because he made everything sound so simple and seem so simple. He was pretty funny too, especially when he was talking about trespassing to get samples and caring about catching bass rather than bluegill’s. The topic was pretty interesting. Amy Callaghan really broke everything down to a more chemistry level which really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me because the last time I had chemistry was high school. We toured the Aeigis laboratory this afternoon. It is neat how many different ways microbiology can be applied, food testing is one. It smelled kinda funny in there, but I liked how clean it was and how they had music playing. It definitely wouldn’t be a job I would like to have because I’m not a good pipetter. Ha! And I don’t think I’d like staring at the same type of things all day. When we got back to the lab we got introduced to some very large auger plates for testing antibiotic resistance. Very simple process, I liked it! After dinner we messed around on some the computers figuring out a few different programs that read our DNA sequences and compared them to other found bacteria. Trichococcus was one which I made a tree for, which was detected in one of our samples. Unfortunately the Mac wouldn’t open to let me know which sample I was looking at but I wrote down the number for future reference. Well tomorrow we are doing a lot of data analysis that I’m looking forward to.
