Parker B-G.

December 18th, 2024

Last night was poster session, and it was really fun. We were placed at the front so a lot of people came to look at our poster. I think people were mainly just interested in our moldy plants though. People seemed to be having fun. Joe, the previous head of WISRD, came to speak, and it was super interesting. Apparently, he is now the Ambassador of Science to Bhutan. Anyways, poster session was really fun. I also had to explain it to little kids, so it helped me explain my project.

December 17th, 2024

Today is poster session. I finished my poster a couple of days ago, and today I was finding my plant cultures because I want to put them on my table. I opened the fridge to get the contaminated plants, when I noticed that the culture we were provided in the kit was contaminated. There is all of this fluffy mold that looks like cotton growing all over the plant to the point where you can’t even see it, and at the root of the mold, on the agar, is this weird yellow, white, and dark green. It is kind of annoying, since that was the plant that we were going to use if this culture failed, but I guess not. Anyways, I am excited for poster session.

November 12th, 2024

Hello! We did our 3rd plant culture on Friday, the 8th. Giulia and I went to Ann Marie’s room during lunch so we could use the laminar flow hood. We had our hair back, gloves on, and lab aprons so it wouldn’t be contaminated. It turns out though, that people have been using our forceps for soldering, so I am not sure how sterile they were, but we did wash them with soap and dip them in ethanol. It went really well though, and I hope it is not getting contaminated. You are supposed to keep the jar cracked open, so the plants can breathe, so we decided to leave it cracked, but cover it with parafilm, which allows gas exchange. Hopefully it will still be able to breathe without being contaminated. I am also going to try and find a place to put it that isn’t close to a lot of mold so it will be less likely to get contaminated. Last time, the plant didn’t root, even though it wasn’t contaminated. Maybe it was already contaminated and it just didn’t look like it, but i think we should try giving it some nutrient solutions and figure out a better way for it to get light, without getting too much light. Maybe I can figure out how to put the light on a cycle? We also need to figure out temperature and humidity.

October 31st, 2024

Happy Halloween! During Dark Matter Day I put the plant cultures in the fridge so they would stay dormant for a bit, but it turns out the mold actually grows a lot more in the cold, so all of it has grown, which I find interesting. The pink mold on the agar hadn’t really grown much since we first noticed it, but since I put it in the fridge, it has grown significantly. Not a huge amount, but a noticeable difference.

October 29th, 2024

We had Dark Matter day. It we it pretty well. It went from 6 to 8. We got about 5 batches, but ran out around 7, so my dad ran to the store and got 2 more batches, but those ran out before 7:30. I didn’t really get to see a lot of the other experiments, but ours was really fun. The recipe was: 1 quart of half and half, 1 quart of heavy whipping cream, one ice cream bowl of sugar, an amount of vanilla that looks about right, and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Next year I want to try making chocolate ice cream as well. It was super fun and a very successful Dark Matter Day.

October 18th, 2024

Dark Matter Day is the 23rd! Next Wednesday! I am making liquid nitrogen ice cream, just like last year. This year Amy will be helping me, which is great. There hasn’t really been any progress with the plant cultures. I ended up moving the uncontaminated leaf to the new sterile agar, but it turns out the leaf was contaminated, and more or the pink stuff grew. Then, more mold started growing, so we have been monitoring the different molds and taking new cultures. We are coordinating with Ann Marie to use their culture hood.

September 26th, 2024

So, our culture got contaminated. On the 17th, I checked on the cultures and saw that there was weird pink stuff growing on the agar and around the plants. Right away, I sent an email to Giulia. 3 of the 4 leaves were contaminated with the pink stuff, so I went to Tim’s room and removed the uncontaminated leaf and moved it to a smaller agar plate. But then, a couple days ago, I noticed that there was all of this mold growing on the plate, and there was more pink stuff growing around the leaf. I think this culture was definitely a failure. But, we still have one more plant left, so we are going to try redoing the culture, but using the laminar flow hood this time so it’s actually sterile. So we are going to try coordinating that with Ann Marie.

September 5th, 2024

Hello! Sorry for not updating my journal yet this year. So far i have made a lot of progress, even though we are only 2 weeks into the year. Me and Giulia redid the plant culture experiment that we did at the end of last school year. Over the summer, our culture got contaminated with some sort of moldy fungusy thing before it could even root. It looks really pretty, but that means the experiment failed. So, yesterday, me and Giulia got here at 8 in the morning (school starts at 9:35 on Wednesdays). We ended up using Tim's room, the chem room, as our lab, since he has super-powered bunsen burners. Sophia, who is interested in doing biology experiments, came to watch. This time, since we had already done the experiment before, it was a lot easier. while last time it took several hours, this time it only took one. Some notable things that happened: There is a step where you have to shake a jar of bleach with the leaves inside it, but the container wouldn’t close all the way, so i accidentally bleached a bunch of my cloths. We also learned that alcohol and bleach makes chloroform, so we got masks to wear. We also had blue gloves and goggles on, and since we had to get things from WISRD, we were walking around the school like that. We ended up cutting up 4 leaves, 2 of which we planted, since we only had 2 jars of agar. We planted 2 pieces of each leaf in each jar, which was probably the hardest part because the forceps we ordered hadn’t come yet, so we were using these giant tweezers that we sterilized from the fish tanks. The leaves kept sticking to the tips. We did make the agar set on a slant though, instead of flat like last time, which made it easier to plant. We are keeping them under the grow lights right now. Today, i replanted the rest of the culture that we took the leaves from, since we didn’t totally destroy it like we did last time. I was able to take the plant with the agar still completely on it out of the tube, so we had tube shaped agar with a plant on it. I scraped off most of the agar, but left some on and planted it in a pot, which is also under the grow lights. Hopefully both the cultures and the replanted plant will both grow.

May 7, 2024

Hello! Right now we are about to work with plant cultures. Since getting cell cultures is super expensive, and it would really suck if we wasted them, we are first going to test and make sure we can actually keep plant cultures alive. Right now we already have the cultures, they are African Violets, but the kit we need hasn’t come yet. It was supposed to come yesterday, but it didn’t come, and then it was supposed to come today, but it still hasn’t. And tomorrow we are doing a class on making CVs, so we won’t be able to work on it then either. I cannot wait for it to come!

April 25, 2024

Hello! Yesterday was poster session, which was really fun. This time, since I still haven’t started my project, me, Ivy, and Gulia all made a poster together about this thing we recently got and the experiment i mentioned in my last entry. The think we got is this Sunrise Absorbance Reader thing. It collect quantitive data from trays based on the color whatever you are measuring turns after you add 2 antibodies, an enzyme, and a substrate. It is also really annoying to use, and we still haven’t actually gotten to test it because A. we can’t really figure out how to set it up and B. we need these special plates that have barcodes on them that we do not have. Anyways, the experiment we are doing is using ELISA, which stands for Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay. It is a way of collecting qualitative data of the amount of the thing you are measuring. Ours we got in this kit so we could practice. We were just measuring the amount of this random antibody they gave to us. But it was really fun, and the last step turns a bunch of bright colors. Anyways, this is the link to our poster: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UAg_gEkNgeq1i2s5SakiWgIgkimmMdn3rh4V4u79aI/edit#slide=id.g63c2b18b36_0_0

It turned out very well, but there was an absolutely terrifying experience. So, it turned out the people from Ellison Institute were coming poster session. We knew this, but what we did not know was that the first guy who came to our poster 10 minutes before it started and was our first person was the person in charge of education at Ellison. He asked the 3 of us a bunch of questions and we didn’t really know what we were talking about since he was our first guest, and it did not go well. But, as more people from Ellison came by, we got better at presenting so i hope they told him that we actually did know what we were doing. He did help us realize that we do need to know a lot more about our project though. But, in the end, after we showed off our experiment (which i will get to in a moment) he offered to give us the special plates we needed to use the quantitive data collector! I am so excited! We are going to get to use it! Yay! And the experiment went super well too. Poster session itself started at 6, and we decided that since we wanted to show everyone the actual color change, to do the final step in front of everyone at 6:45. So when people came by to look at our poster, we would tell them to come back at 6:45 to see the color change. We had already done all of the other steps in the experiment, so this was the only step left. And when 6:45 came around, we had a huge group of people around us. Guilia, who hasn’t used the pipettes as much as me and ivy, explained the process while the 2 of use put the substrate into the plates using micropipettes. It was really funny, since it took us about 2 minutes to put in all of the substrate, and then another 5 minutes for it to finishing color changing. Then we had to put in the stop solution, which took another minute or so. But it ended up turning out well. Plate B ended up turning a perfect gradient in the top 3 wells of row 2, and Plate A did have a gradient, but not one as perfect. It went pretty well though. Then we had a speaker, which was fun. She works for JPL and was talking to us about the Europa Clipper, which she helped test the Spectrometer for it. She was an optical engineer, and super nice, but not the best presenter. It was pretty interesting though. There were all sorts of cool posters of exoplanets by the entrance to the theater, which was cool. So that was poster session. Yay!

April 10, 2024

Hi! Sorry i am so bad at updating my journal. Right now, me and Ivy are doing an expirement to practice doing some of the stuff we will need for cell culture, as well as some of the materials we needed to test out. So far we only have set up the expierement. We spent the entirety of class today reconstituting the chemicals we will be using. We are going to actualy do the expieriemnt tomorrow, and we are going to test out this machine we got as well, called the SUNRISE Absorbance Reader, which i am very excited to test.

February 14, 2024

Hello! For some reason my last update didn’t save, but i think i am going to start up a composting lab in WISRD. Also, my grandpa met this guy at a CAIS conference who is the senior vice president of a biotech company, and my grandpa told him. all about my project and WISRD and how we need plastics to start my project, and the guy said that he might be able to help. So he gave my grandpa his email and asked for me to send him an email, so i did, and megan looked over it, and then we sent it, yesterday morning, and he responded this morning!

What we wrote:

Dear Mr. Ganguly,

      Hello! I hope you are doing well. My name is Parker Barton-Grimley, you met my grandfather, Joel Schneider, at the CAIS conference a couple of weeks ago. I am emailing you to ask if you can point us in the right direction as to where to purchase microplastics. I go to a school called Wildwood, where we have a program called WISRD (Wildwood Institute of STEM Research and Development) where I am planning to do a study on how microplastics affect intestinal epithelial cells, and how that connects to autoimmune diseases like IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease). This is my first foray into cell culture and this level of biology, and I have personal interest as I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, which is one of the 2 types of IBD, when I was 9 years old. Since then, I have been very interested in research pertaining to IBD and hope to become a pediatric gastroenterologist who specializes in IBD, as well as IBD research, when I am an adult. 

      As of now, we are still setting up the lab and getting the materials, and one of the materials we still need for the project is a source of microplastics and/or nano plastics. My grandfather mentioned that you might be able to connect us to people who could provide us with the plastics we need for the project. We are asking for about 250 grams of microplastics and 250 grams of nano plastics. The reason we are asking for this amount is that not only will we be using these plastics for my project, but also for several other labs that require microplastics as well. My project, as well as the other ones that need microplastics, are multiyear projects, so more would be better than less. However, we will take anything we can get, even if it isn’t anywhere near the amount we require. I hope you are having a nice day and look forward to hearing your response. 

      Sincerely,

            Parker Barton-Grimley

What he responded:

Hi

I will forward your email to our head of ops, who maybe able to help.

Joydeep

(His name is Joydeep Ganguly)

Anyways, I am so excited! Hopefully we will be able to get micro and nano plastics soon! Yay! Also, we just learned how to micropipette, and it is so fun. I am probably going to do that a lot one we start my project. Yay!

Sources for Winter 2023 Poster Session:

Mayer, Melissa. “Autoimmunity on the Rise.” Global Autoimmune Institute, 24 Aug. 2022, www.autoimmuneinstitute.org/articles/about-autoimmune/autoimmunity-on-the-rise/. 

Winter 2020, Yale Magazine of Medicine. “Untangling the Web of Autoimmune Diseases.” Yale School Of Medicine, Winter 2020, medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/untangling-the-web-of-autoimmune-diseases/. 

Sharma, Chetan, and Jagadeesh Bayry . “High Risk of Autoimmune Diseases after COVID-19.” Nature Reviews Rheumatology, 12 Apr. 2023, nature.com/articles/s41584-023-00964-y. 

Haederle, Michael. “Gut Check UNM Researchers Find Microplastics in Food and Water Alter the Immune System.” Health Sciences Newsroom, 16 June 2021, hsc.unm.edu/news/2021/06/microplastics-altering-immune-system.html. 

American Autoimmune, Related Diseases Association Inc. “1 - 5 Brochure.” Autoimmune Facts, autoimmune.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1-in-5-Brochure.pdf. 

Martins, Kris. “What Is an Autoimmune Disease?” Edited by Zilpah Sheikh, WebMD, 4 Oct. 2023, www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/autoimmune-diseases. 

December 12th, 2023

Hello! Today is poster session. About the last entry, i am not doing plant culture. I am instead using mouse epithelial cells and exposing them to micro plastics. I wrote my inquirer on how autoimmune diseases are being triggered more often because of micro plastics, and i am going to do an experiment to test what happens when you expose mouse intestinal epithelial cells to micro plastics. I wrote my poster about this as well. I am so excited. I didn’t realize that we were supposed to wear our WISRD shirts, so i will ask my parents to bring that for me.

November 14, 2023

Hello! I spent the past month or so researching the HeLa cells, and we were super close to being ready to order them, but when i looked up safety protocol, it tuns out that they are biosafety level 2, which means we need authorization to handle them, which we probably won’t get. i am pretty upset as i was super excited to do this, but we are going to do plant culture stuff instead. I really don’t like taking care of plants. At all. I think they are super pretty, but they are so boring to take care of. But it might be interesting. If we do plant culture stuff, they are more likely to authorize us doing human cell culture stuff.

September 19, 2023

Hello! I am kind of annoyed because i had several entries that i had written, but i stupidly forgot to save them, so now they are gone. To summarize, I will be studying cell and tissue cultures and setting up a space so we can use and experiment on them. I am enjoying WISRD a lot. At first, i felt super overwhelmed and had no idea what i was doing and had a sort of breakdown. But now i am doing great. Hopefully this cell culture thing will work and be fun! I am kind of bored right now, since i have written out everything i need for the cell culture stuff and i am almost done with my inquirer stuff.

August 23, 2023

Hello! Today is my first day of WISRD! All of the stuff here looks really cool. Like out of some movie. I really want to do something related to medical sciences, so we will see what happens with that. I also want to build stuff, so i am hoping i will get to do some of that too. I am so excited to be able to do research about that. I know we wont be able to do any research that would endanger living animals, which is a little disappointing, but it makes sense, considering this is a school with small children. **Note from Megan- we can do some animal studies, like behavior and genetic studies! Just not harm them for pranks, etc.