This week, the team met with teacher mentor Mrs.Peterson again. Now that a more detailed idea and possible process had been created by the team, we could focus more on the practical matters at hand such as what specifically to purchase and when, what preliminary tests to run, and experimental design. It was decided that the first logical step is to test local bodies of water, specifically ones that have trouble with E.Coli infection and re-infection, for variables such as pH, salinity, O2 levels, CO2, levels, aquatic flora and fauna, etc. Once we have all this information we will start to build our in-house testing tank modeled after these bodies of water. We will be ordering our strains from Carolina Biological supply, as the school has done business with them in the past so it will be easier to obtain the special permits and passes required. Our experimental route is to first test to see if the T-4 is killing the E.Coli at all, as that is the most important variable, from there it was decided that we would then test for concentration needed, as the bacteriophages go through a lytic lifecycle which will impact our results. Afterwards, if all goes well, we will see the best environment for the phages and test for their impact on other organisms in the environment to see if there are any negative impacts on them, from there we test with actual water from our sources to see if it works in practice. Notes of all this from the meeting can be found in the pictures below.
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For this upcoming week(s), a few of the team's short-term goal include:
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