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.

It’s a common practice for amateur researchers, community labs, and some of the more cash-strapped research labs (there’s more than you might imagine!) to use common grocery store variety distilled water for non-essential media and reagents needs.

Results of Deinococcus radiophilus soft agar run from last week is finally out – and it is about as I expected, as disappointing as it might be. While I was hoping for a confirmation of the sometimes bizarre growth pattern of Deinococcus radiophilus (observed across multiple different labs!), at least as far as our current […]

The weekend continues with the repeat run of the previous Deinococcus radiophilus soft agar run. In our last run, the plates still showed anomalous growth behavior even in the absence of CaCl2, and without U.V. activation to a certain degree.

As I have mentioned in other places before, one of my primary goals as an amateur researcher is to sample and find phages specific to the Deinococcus genus, mostly through testing samples from the East River.

A quick note for the day – primary media used in the lab for anything related to Deinococcus, phages or otherwise, is TGYM recipe as mentioned in the paper by Lewis, N.F. Studies on a radio-resistant coccus isolated from Bombay duck (Harpodon nehereus) describing the original isolation and characterization of the Deinococcus radiophilus.

I maintain two different Halobacteria lines as a kind of off-time activity to cool my head with.

I told you so; even as I abandoned this place a decade ago, it was obvious that this would happen again. Welcome to the online lab notebook and blog for an amateur scientist.