Week Two

I have some exciting and unfortunate news to share. I'll give you the bad news first because that's always what I prefer: at the end of last week, we received the word that the experiment will no longer be able to be on top of the roof of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability because of safety concerns. However, Dr. Chaudhary is hard at work looking for another roof on campus where our experiment can find a home. Until then, we've been busy setting up the MIP, which has been successful (the good news):

Germinated corn with radical

Planting germinated corn kernels

After two days of sitting in water, the corn germinated (photo on left) and we were able to plant it in our "conetainers" (photo on right). We very carefully placed our five different treatments of soil in different "conetainers" (five replicates of each treatment). Throughout this process, we continually cleaned the beakers we used to distribute the soil, the small tools we used to make holes for the corn, and our hands, to ensure that there was no cross-contamination of the different soils. Additionally, we gave each "conetainer" a number between 1 and 30. Each position was also assigned a number so that we could randomly designate where our "conetainers" would be placed (using a random generator in excel), in order to eliminate variables such as sunlight, water, etc. Here's what the finished product looked like:

MIP all ready to go

 A few days later the shoots started emerging from the soil: 

MIP: Day 6

So, the MIP is off to a great start. We water the corn daily and make sure that each plant gets the same amount of water. We will continue to track the seedlings' progress until they are more mature plants, when we will start to analyze the amount of mycorrhizal fungi that has formed a symbiotic relationship with each of the plant's roots. 

In other good news, the sedum is looking great! One variety has even bloomed!

Flowering sedum

On another note, Sarah and I are working to better understand how we can use this fancy machine (photo below), the Ion Chromatograph, to perform soil nutrient analyses. This machine analyzes the anions and cations in a sample in parts per million. We are trying to write a protocol, in addition, on how to extract the ions we are most interested in (ammonium, nitrate, and phosphate) from soil into a solution that can be analyzed, since the ion chromatograph will not be able to handle the concentrations that are directly in the soil. This is quite a task for us both, so we will keep you up to date. We are hoping to meet with Katrina Binaku, a Loyola University PhD candidate, who knows the ins and outs of this machine in hopes of receiving some guidance.

881 Compact IC Pro

Until then, wish us luck!