S-STEM Scholar Belinda Chesser's Blog

 This Is It! This is officially the last day of the semester. I made it! Not gonna lie, there was some doubt there for a little while. I am so ready for the break before the next semester starts. I'm planning to catch up on sleep, reading, and household chores. But let's be honest, it's mostly about the sleep.  I hope my STEM-TRAIN colleagues have a nice decompression break, and I look forward to seeing them again next semester.

 Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. I found the short break from school responsibilities very much needed. I feel like after a very stressful and overwhelming month and a half that I've been able to recharge a bit.  That recharged energy is going to be needed as we now go into the final week and the finals included within. I have a big final paper to write and two final exams to take this week. Thankfully, one of those exams is open-book/note "take-home," so that helps to reduce a good chunk of stress.  Just one more week. Let's do this!

 Happy Halloween!  October is coming to a close and we'll be going into the final month of the semester.  October has been a rough month for me. I've struggled with the mid-semester slump, falling behind in a couple classes. I've also been dealing with a death in my immediate family this month, which has made it more difficult to stay afloat. But things are getting better and I am committed to finishing out the semester. Registration for Spring 2021 went well, and I was able to get all the classes I need. The semester is going to be lab-heavy, but I think that's just a necessary reality for my major, Forensic Science. I will need to continue to work on my time management skills to make sure I stay on top of things. One more month to go!

Today marks the last day of my first full month at ASU. I transferred from Glendale Community College, and the process has been a bit overwhelming, especially with all of the COVID-19 restrictions in place. I live with two people who are considered high risk, so I am opting to attend all of my classes remotely. I normally have difficulty staying motivated and on task with online classes, but it has helped that my classes are largely synchronous. So I'm able to maintain a schedule of sorts and have some interaction with instructors and fellow students.  I'm looking forward to when things return to "somewhat normal" and we are able to attend classes and activities in person. 

11/19 Took the PEMS inactivation plates out of the incubator. The TSB plate showed contamination and growth in quarter #2, so it will be excluded from MALDI-TOF analyzation. The other plates showed expected growth in the "live" side and no growth in the "inactivated" side. 11/21 Today I arranged the images I took from each step into documents so that I could more easily see the progression of color, clarity, and biofilm production of the flasks through the experiment. I did the same with the plate colony images to be able to contrast and compare them. 11/23 I thought back on the experiment and made notes: I would like to repeat the experiment with D. aquaticus  along with 2-3 other Deinococcus  species per discussion with Stacy. The timeline needs to be significantly tightened up. I need to make sure to ALWAYS get gram stains, particularly for bacterial growth in broth. We need to determine if there should be any changes to the media selection...

11/12 Planned what I needed to have ready in order to perform PEMS on the final batch of inoculated flasks. 11/14 Inoculated flasks from the 10/26 plates and placed them in the incubator. 11/15 Prepped the plates needed to show the inactivation of bacteria for the PEMS process. I also did some research on various Deinococcus  species. 11/16 Busy day. Flasks were taken out of the incubator and inspected for growth, then OD readings were performed. OD readings. I did gram stains for each of the flasks. The TSB sample did show contamination, indicated by the small spheres mixed in with the rods that are more typical of D. aquaticus . The gram stains also showed some discrepancies. D. aquaticus  is typically Gram negative, however, the stains I did showed a mixture of negative and positive, sometimes within the same sample. LB R2B TGY TSB TSYE With Stacy's assistance, we did PEMS on my samples to be analyzed with MA...