Review of MSTTF

Blogging is difficult because our school district does not allow access to blogging from school computers where all my lesson plans and materials are so I will be doing this at home.

I did complete the lesson plans that I had originally planned and they went reasonably well with my 9th grade chem/physics class

Day1: Introduction to measurement of volumes
Day2: Mixing different volumes of colored water to increase measuring skills
Day3: Limestone rocks and vinegar crstalling growing. This illustrated that different strengths of acetic acid got different results
Day4: Growing copper sulphate crystals using different slution concentrations. Done on a Friday so we could see they results on Monday
Day5: The students wrote an essay recording there thoughts about the experiments

I was disappointed that at present no other teachrs have shown any interest in using these lesson plans.

But I thought that the lessons were a great way of showing the importance of precise measurements and led into discussion of atomic property of mattter as we discussed the crystal structure showed an underlying symmetry to matter

Third week of school

The school year is now 2 1/2 weeks old. I missed the first week as my wife was thrown from a horse while on vacation in Utah. Fortunately there was no nerve damage but she had to have C5-C6 vertebrae fused. In the first days of school I have concntrated on measuring length ( in imperial system and the metric system) and mass in grams. We have spent a day discussing the difference between variables, vlaues and relations between these variables. I have used the program "Understanding Science". This will all lead well into our inorganic crystal section.

This morning we continued with the gfp extraction. We put a resin/nickel mixture in a syringe. Then we put the gfp sample on top of the nuckel solution. The gfp should bind to the nickel. Tis is a time consuming process.

We aso took photos of our ps1 crystals. We had three sizes, micro, small and large. The large are big enough to be used in x-ray diffraction.
We also found that that our phlocyanin crystals are in Berkley and may be used on the syncchotron.

Jenniferand I worked with with Di on the GFP extraction. Di had previously centrifued the broth to extract the e-coli bacteria which had been kept an -80 C overnight. The cell walls of the baacteria was then broken using a sonicizer, sort of like a high tech sonic toothbrush. The mixture was then centrifued again. Tomorrow we will purify using a nickel column.

Also we carried on with our inorganic cystallisation. Our crystals of copper sulphate were excellent. We aslo created crystals of potassium chloride.

Jodie, Jannette and Petra were here unitl 9pm last night working on the power point. It looks excellent.

At this morning's seminar Craig gave an excellent power point presentation on the physics of photosynthesis and fluoresence. Craig was mostly concerned with the emitted light after PS1 have absorbed light. He studied this process with a smear camera which allows the amplitude and wavelength of a light pulse to be studied over a short period of time. Craig had found that here were four different light emissions with different time constants.

Next we talked with Petra about some possible inorganic crystal growing projects we could do next week which might be suitable for our classrooms. Also , next week, we will work on isolating the GFP protein.

This morning we took pictures of our lysozyme crystals. The we spent time in the cold room working n our PS1 crystals. WE had already planted small crystals inn a protein mix. There dialysis vessels had now created medium size crystals which were in the form of rods. These rod crystals were planted into another dialysis vessel with the correct buffer/salt concentration with the hope of creating large crystals

Today we continued our PCR lab. Our cultures had spent an hour in the PCR machine and had hopefully multiplied. Now we had to use a gel and electric voltage to see if that was true. We had created the gel yesterday. A sample of each PCR run with a loading dye was put into a small well at the top of the gell. We had 5 samples plus a standard. A volatge of 100V was placed across the gel and left for an hour. To see the DNA we had to add ethidium bromide which binds to the DNA. We then looked at the gel under a UV lamp. DNA had been multplied, the PCR had worked.

We also spent an hour with Professor Wachter discussing green fluorescent proteins(GFP). GFP are an immense area of interest. Nam is creating mutants of GFP to see if the can react in a faster amount, at present 1/2 hour