Everything must come to an end...

The bulk of the summer is now over but it’s the best summer I’ve had ever since I came to the States. For once, I know what I’m doing and what the next step is. It can all be planned out and I can walk through them step-by-step. It is definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on something like that but that’s just the beginning. Like all research, a troubled phase will eventually come if I work on it longer because that’s why it’s called “re-search”. I just have to go back every once in a while and start again. If everything is as smooth as it is over the summer then we won’t be doing any research today. But at the same time, it’s frustrating when nothing works, when for two years, everything you do goes down the drain because it doesn’t tells you anything. Wait….that’s life right? :) We just gotta keep going.

So what exactly was my research about at Woods Hole? I tried to look for methanol oxidizing denitrifiers at Trunk River. They are important for conversion of nitrate to gaseous nitrogen. Nitrate can be pretty harmful to the water quality because it promotes eutrophication that will decrease dissolved oxygen content in the water. From the first couple weeks, we were taught the classical enrichment techniques for different organisms and one of them was using high nitrate medium to enrich for denitrifier. That’s exactly what I used and providing methanol as carbon source. I’ve got the coolest bug ever! It’s a type of prosthecate bacteria, having cytoplasmic protrusions at one or both end of the cell. Aren’t they cute? The first one is at 400X magnification while the other is the scanning electron micrograph of the enrichment culture. They are pretty tiny too if you just consider the size of the cell without the prosthecae. Brought it back with me towork with but still gotta keep my fingers cross to see if they’ll grow as well here.
I’ve not done much culturing work since undergrad days and it feels good to be able to do that again. Molecular biology is definitely a great tool but sometimes it creates a gap between you and your bug. I no longer need to look at them under the scope or grow them under different conditions. All I need is their DNA or RNA to work with. In the end, I don’t even see the bug at all because I make use of our good ‘ol trusted E. coli. It is lots of fun working with molecular approaches because it can answer a lot of questions. But there’s a lot more out there that can be answered by culturing.

Besides science, it’s a lot fun at Woods Hole too. Definitely a work hard, play hard environment. People would work late into the night but we would also be playing games and hanging out in the afternoon. But one reason why it is so intense is that there’s nothing else to do there besides research. The lodging sucks so I’d rather be in lab. The one thing that I love the most is being able to take a 30 minutes break and just sit by the beach, looking out into the ocean and not think of anything. Yup, all I did was sit and stare. After dinner, I could lie down on the bench, look up to the sky and just look at the stars. Sometimes it makes me sad that all of us – mom and dad, ahmah, ahboy – can be looking at the same sky and yet we’re all so far apart. But the intensity of the research doesn’t allow much time to dwell on what we don’t have…which is the one thing that kept me motivated there. It’s all about science.

Now, Ping-Ping is back at Lansing…time to deal with reality.