It is lunch time here in Turkey so I will give a short update about what I am actually doing. It is true, I am doing actual work and not just eating all the time.
Yesterday I spent all day (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 30 min. tea breaks at 9:30 and 3 and lunch from noon until one) stuffing cotton in growth tubes. I sat on a half meter high wooden stool with a pillow on it as bag after bag of growth tubes were brought in. It was tedious but necessary work for future experiments.
That night after Fateh cooked a nice Syrian style dinner consisting of lentals, wheat and onions. After dinner Fateh and I returned to the lab where he was counting Cereal Cyst Nematodes. I set up the plates while he checked them under a microscope. We finished around 11:30.
This morning I started working with Elfinesh, a Ph.D. student studding at a university in Ankara but originally from Addis Ababa Ethiopia. She is counting spores under a microscope. So, I have been setting up the slides so she can go from one to the next without stopping. It is important that the conditions and the procedure is sterile, so I have been bathing in a 96% Alcohol solution. My hands are soft now but I can tell they will dry out by tonight.
That is all for now! I'll stop trying to give you a timeline on when you can expect pictures. It will just have to be a surprise!
*Edit 6:30*
The rest of the afternoon I continued working with Elfinesh. Once she had a count on how many spores were in the solution, we set up a ratio to find how much spore solution : Distilled Water was needed in order to get around 2,86o,000 spores per mL for 9mL of solution in total. Once we had our numbers for all 53 samples, we stared transferring solutions and water. It took some creative thinking especially since there are always unpredictable challenges to overcome. We eventually got everything set up for the experiment tomorrow.
*Edit 6:30*
The rest of the afternoon I continued working with Elfinesh. Once she had a count on how many spores were in the solution, we set up a ratio to find how much spore solution : Distilled Water was needed in order to get around 2,86o,000 spores per mL for 9mL of solution in total. Once we had our numbers for all 53 samples, we stared transferring solutions and water. It took some creative thinking especially since there are always unpredictable challenges to overcome. We eventually got everything set up for the experiment tomorrow.
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