Another round of observation from the initial East River sampling, on the road to discover bacteriochlorophyll a producing aerobic alphaproteobacteria strains from our own local environment (who can afford ATCC strains out of pocket these days?

A quick report on the East River water sample struck out on home-made PPES-II type media. Two days were enough for the new plates to propagate, though the initially white colonies will take some time to accrue whatever the pigment they were originally producing on the raw East River water inoculation plate.

Earlier than expected results on the East River water screening for bacteriochlorophyll a producing alphaproteobacteria. Both of the homemade media plates from the 19th show healthy colony growth as of the morning of 23rd, mere three days after inoculation.

I ran a quick test of a makeshift kitchen media for East River screening, based of the PPES-II used in some older Deinococcus and Alphaproteobacteria research papers.

Or rather, there was an attempt. Things had been a little hectic with our final dash to finish the final draft of the Deinococcus research project that dragged on for close to two years – and make no mistake, those were some tumultuous two years of research.

The screening study for aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic alphaproteobacteria in the East River continues, even as we are on the verge of the seventh draft for our Deinococcus radiophilus paper.

I’ve been reading into bacteriochlorophyll a utilizing alphaproteobacteria recently, prompted by the question of selecting among wildtype microbes and studying their evolution long-term. Chances are, whatever the sample I’ll be able to screen from the East River would be carotenoid producing aerobic photoheterotroph, likely from the upper sediment layer.

With yesterday’s test PCR successful, we immediately got to Q5 (high fidelity enzyme) PCR for Sanger sequencing of the final genome fragment. After this, we can finally update the Nanopore genome and finalize the figures for our publication.

We’re almost there – final Sanger sequencing confirmation of Par A type protein and an integrase in our Deinococcus radiophilus genome before updating our draft for final publication. At last! Tonight’s run was a straightforward Taq PCR to check our primer design against our genome extraction stock.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been part of an exciting class on frugal science (https://www.frugalscience.org/) – the class consists of lecture-workshop portions and student-led research projects to be wrapped up and presented by the end of the course.

It’s been a rather eventful week, something I’ll need to catch up on the lab notes later. For now, please enjoy the pictures of our new Flongle adapter (and our flowcells, but I really don’t want to take them out of the packaging yet)! Chances are we’ll be using these for organelles and phage sequencing.