Final week at C-MORE

I just started on my last week of work at the C-MORE summer course. What remains is an intense week of data analysis of the data we all generated from the lab work back at C-MORE hale. It includes many biochemical parameters as well as metagenomics. In the end we are supposed to take all these datasets and, as a group, try to make sense of them and tell a story to a general audience about what we found out at station ALOHA this past week. It will all be presented as a two-hour seminar on the last day.

I've already been part of a lot of work, including both practical lab analyses and data handling. My midsummer was spent calculating low level nitrogen (LLN), bacterial production (radiolabeled Leu) and primary production (14C). Despite a 15 hour workday, my group is not quite done yet. It was a valiant effort that took most of the evening, but in the end we couldn't finalize our datasheets due to insufficient structure in some of the cruise work group's raw data. Annoying, but a wall of numbers without labels is hard to make any sense of.

Anyway, these last calculations will be finished today since most of it by now is just a matter of putting in the data (in the correct order) into the template spreadsheets that we prepared yesterday. This is why I sometimes love Excel. The initial calculations take some time but as soon as the first calculation spreadsheet is set up it is just a matter of entering the raw data into one column and Excel will take care of the rest to automatically give me the calculated numbers at the (far away) end of it. Beautiful.

The lab method I had the privilege to run was, as mentioned, LLN, which is a chemical and gas chromatography (GC) based method where we apply analytical chemistry to measure nitrogen concentrations in the upper surface waters that are too low (less than 1 µM) to be detected by conventional auto-detectors. It is therefore fully manual where we add a few chemicals to our sample together with a carrier gas which will transport the sample through the system and into the GC where the nitrogen concentration will be recorded as a peak on a histogram on a computer. This will ultimately give us concentrations down to the nano-scale. This fact of course makes the method extremely sensitive to contaminations.
Another upside is that due to all the bubbling chemicals, which changed colour when added, you felt a tiny bit like a mad scientist. Muahaha!

The final day of lecture is soon about to start. It will be a day full of omics, Galaxy and also some microbial culturing signed Scott Gifford, former student at this very course. I'm sure it's gonna be an interesting day!