Here I am again

I don’t know if it’s just me or everyone has the same feeling that after spring break the rest of the semester goes really fast. It kinda makes me worry that finals, project and lots of other things getting close, on the other hand I’m interested for the graduation and some changes. Anyway I hope the rest of the semester goes well for everyone.

So on Friday I was in the campus after my morning classes and I got caught by Matt and Josh. They told me about the Estrella Mountain Community College conference which is on May 2^nd, and I needed to come up with an abstract, to submit it on Monday because they just found out that the due was on Monday.

This week, on Monday I had my abstract ready. Matt like always helped me a lot, to correct the grammar, punctuation and etc. Also he gave me some great idea to add to it and he submitted it for me. So on Monday pretty much all I did was to finish the abstract.

Back to the experiment, since I did set up all the petri dishes and water them with 50% solution last Thursday. I should wait for at least a week to start counting the seed germination. So while I was waiting and didn’t have anything to do on Tuesday, Matt decided to test the experiment with another method. Since we know that it is also expected that the allelopathic chemicals can be found in the soil surrounding these plants as well.  Additional allelopathy experiments will be carried out with the soil from under the canopy of each of these plants (Sycamore, Sun flower, Orange, Oak and Mesquite), to determine if germination of the garden seeds is inhibited by the soil.

So I was lucky this time because Matt was already collected the soil from under the canopy of each one, and I didn’t need to do that, but first we needed to determine the volume of soil to put in each petri dishes

The soil needed to be more crushed up, so I dumped it out to the big plate and smashed it, and because we didn’t want to cross contaminant the soils, we used 6 different plates to smash each one separately.

So first of all I needed to label the petri dishes again. But before I forgot, I would like to say thank you to Jose because he helped me with labeling and smashing the soils. Then after we labeled all 120 petri dishes, I started to add 30 mL of soil with a small beaker to each dish.

That's how we smashed the soil :)

labeled petri dishes

set up petri dishes with 30mL soil on ech

Finally today I counted the seed germination of all my petri dishes with 50% solution treatment. And I’m going to show you the result, the pictures and the graphs on next blog soon.

let's get started

I hope everyone enjoyed their Spring Break, mine was good but I was working almost the whole week and I came to the lab couple times. This week with the beginning of the spring I finished the graphs for 50% solutions and I compared them to their 100% solution. And Matt went through the graphs and analyzed them for me. He also analyzed the variance and compared all the petri dishes with controlling plates which were the dishes that DI water was their treatment. According to my observation of seeds germination and Matt explanation about the graphs and calculations, I can say that this time I got better result and the result was pretty interesting. I’m sure by looking at the graphs you can find out the differences easily between the graphs. And below are the graphs for all the treatments also the 50% solution treatment for Sycamore, Sun flower and Orange tree.

Radish germination, 100% & 50% solution

Chard germination, 100% & 50% solution

Lettuce germination, 100% & 50% solution

Carrot germination, 100% & 50% solution

Since I made the 50% solution only for Sycamore, Sun flower and Orange tree, Matt decided to do the 50% solution treatment for Oak and Mesquite tree as well to have a complete graphs. And after I get done with that maybe I start the 25% solution for all of them.

So exactly like before the first step was setting up the petri dishes, for this time I just needed to prepare 60 petri dishes; 20 dishes for Oak, 20 for Mesquite and the other 20 are the controlling dishes with DI water. And again I cut off the filter papers, two for each petri dish. Next step was labeling the petri dishes, 5 petri dishes for each seeds (radish, chard, lettuce, and carrot). Then I started to count 25 of each type of seeds and put them on the labeled dishes between the two filter papers. Then for making the solutions I had some grind leaves save since last time and I didn’t need to collect and grind the leaves again, so I weight 10.0 gr of each sample and add 200 mL of DI water to it, I closed the lead with parafilm and let them to stay in room temperature for 24 hours. And finally the day after making the solution, I did water the petri dishes with 5 mL pipet, and covered all of them by parafilm to prevent the evaporation. So I was able to finish all the plates this week and all I need to do is waiting for a week, then start counting the seeds and collecting the data.  

Here we go....

So this week I continued to work on my new allelopathy test project but with few changes than what I explained last week. And that was about putting some crumbled leaves inside the petri dishes with seeds but Matt decided that I don’t need to do that anymore.

I had my petri dishes ready since last week and I also had the Sycamore, Sun flower and Orange tree’s leaves ready and completely dried out for this week experiment. On Monday I found out that the last minute leaf collecting saved me a lot of time because the leaves dried out naturally in the lab during the weekend.

Oak branches

Oak and Mesquite leaves

Anyway, last week due to my short time in the last day I couldn’t make it to collect the Oak and Mesquite leaves, so I took another journey around the campus to collect the leaves. The Oak leaves are small and it’s kind of hard to collect the full basket, specially the basket that I have because it has a big holes on it and the leaves kept falling. But this time I was lucky and one of the maintenance guys saw me and cut some of the branches for me, he made my job much easier. Since I needed the leaves to be dry, I let them to dry for a day but it didn’t work well, so with Matt idea I ended up with spread them on separate trays and put them in the oven for one more day to make them dry faster and save me some time. 

Oak and Mesquite leaves after one day in oven

Those two days that I was waiting for the Oak and Mesquite leaves to get dry, I started the experiment with my other leaves. Grinding the leaves was the first step and I start doing it with mortar & pestle, which wasn’t that easy and would take a long time, since technology is always helpful instead of mortar & pestle I used blender to grind the leaves and I got pretty good powder of each one.

Blender was a good idea but too messy!

 Then I made a 2% solution for each sample, by weighing 20.0 gr of the sample (leaves powder) and adding 200 mL of DI water to it, I closed the lead with parafilm and let them to stay like that for a day. And finally the day after making the solution, I did water the petri dishes with 5 mL pipet. 

2% solution of each treatment

After I got done with watering and using the solution, I made a 50% solution with the remaining solution and I added another 100mL to it. And I set up another set of petri dishes next to the other one in order to test the 50% solution on germination of the seeds and comparing the both result together. So this week I was able to finish all the plates and watering them and also fold all of them with parafilm to prevent the evaporation. And now I have to patiently wait for a week or more to see the result and start counting the seeds again.

50% solution of each treatment

petri dishes water with 2% solution

Petri dishes water with 50% solution

Redo the test

Sadly this week I couldn't be in the biology lab like I used to, because the school was close on Monday for the President Day and I lost some hours, but on the other hand since I’m always busy and work every day even weekends, it was a right time for day off because I could celebrate my birthday and spend some time with my family and friends.

But back to my alellopathy project I believe that I mentioned in my last blog that Matt told me to redo the alellopathy test but in a different way. So basically I won’t do the leaf extraction again, and what I’m going to do this time is to take some crumpled up dried out leaves and put them in the petri dishes with the seeds and then water the petri dishes with just distilled water (5mL each)and determine if there’s an effect on germination of any of them.

120 set up petri dishes

So far I set up all the petri dishes, which are 120 petri dishes, just like I did before for leaf extraction. I cut off the filter papers, two for each petri dish. Then I started to label all the dishes with the name of the seeds and treatments. When I got done with labeling, I used the same seeds, radish, chard, lettuce and carrot. And I started to count 25 of each type of seeds and put them on the labeled dishes between the two filter papers. After set up the petri dishes I went to Phoenix College garden and collected the leaves from Sycamore tree, Sun flower, Orange tree, Mesquite and Oak tree. That’s where I stopped this week and for the next week I need to dry out some leaves, I’ll put some crumpled up leaves of a certain amount in the petri dishes and then I’ll water the petri dishes with 5 mL.