GMU:DIY Biolab “Driver’s License”/Suna Yoo

File:suna-mycelia-paper.pdf

Well, this is my Biolab diary now.

1. Day in the Lab, I heard the introduction and had to leave earlier because of the Fachschaft plenum. So i didn´t learn how to cook the first medium, the one for bacteria.

2. Day. Take pictures of everything you do, said Miga. But my phone cam was broken. Instead i took this picture with my analogue „exacta135“ (1). That day we cooked medium for euglena and amoeba, but i´d got a very bad cold, my nose was running away and i was afraid of contaminating everything just by breathing. I went earlier because i was so tired, eventhough the other members of the fachschaft said that i can come later. Because uni goes first.

3. Day. I think the first courseday i really participated. I thought about not even going to the course, i was so stressed off my other courses, that took place the first time that week, just thinking about them made me worry about how to survive that semester. But than i quit all of them except biolab and decided to do another projekt. That was good. And than i met Azuzena in the M18 garden and realized that she was our teacher today. So i went. It was very interesting, Mycelium and slime molds are not as little as the other organisms. You don´t have to look through a microscope to see them. We could nearly touch them and smell them, imagine their consitence. You don´t need to have programming skills to do art-work with them. Azuzena showed us, what other people had already done. What stuck in my mind, was that you can heat mycelium and it will keep it´s form. For example in bricks or leather. Under the instructions of Azuzena i inoculated my first medium with spores. It was 15 minutes boiled cardboard. The container we used to store it, was ironically a blue supermarket Champignon box. After the Inoculation, wich in this case only means, to put a peace of wood with spores in it, between two or three sheets of hot cardboard. And then leave it in the oven, that is not called oven.

4. 31.10. Halloween. Motivated by the experiences in the last lesson, i started doing something at home. This time i wanted to experiment with growing mycelium in coffee mold. I already had collected some for a time, because on my travels during the summer i had learned to use it instead of dish-soap. In addition i had plucked some fungi caps out of my garden, put them on a piece of paper and waited for them to drop their spores, facing their dead by drying out in my room. So i took put on my new rollerskates (2) and desinfected the whole kitchen with Korn (3), a typical thuringian alcohol. Then I boiled the coffee mold (4) for 15 minutes, maybe longer and put it in a bowl to let it cool down (5). Then i desinfected an old paprika sauce glass with Korn and put the boiled mold inside (6) rotatory with pieces of the dropped spores (7&8-10) and tapped it with kitchen paper. In the end i heated my oven to 50 degrees, let it cool down and then stored the glass in it with circulating air (11). Later that day i went to the lab to put in in the real machine.

5. Day. We started a Analization of our DNA. Means: gargle a sodium solution and then pipet a lot. I don´t know what and maybe even Miga does not really know. We follow the instruction. I think we seperated our DNA.. This is a photo of my last experiment, 1 week later:

I think it is contaminated, definetly too wet, says Miga.

6. While a PCR machine redoubles a part of our DNA, marked by a primer. Julian explains us the process (13). At first the machine heats up the small Eppis, our DNA double Helix splits up. The primer adopts to a special sequence, on each side one. „A primer is a short strand of RNA or DNA (generally about 18-22 bases) that serves as a starting point for DNA synthesis. It is required for DNA replication because the enzymes that catalyze this process, DNA polymerases, can only add new nucleotides to an existing strand of DNA. The polymerase starts replication at the 3'-end of the primer, and copies the opposite strand.” (Wikipedia). Yes and then it cools the Eppi down and the nucleotides can be added to the strand. And this happens a lot of times (30 more or less) until there is enough to be analized. Only the sequence between the beginning and end primer is being redoubled, that makes diffrent DNA´s comparable. At least parts of it. I think Julian brought us the primer that is used to seperate the part of the Helix that stores the information about our regional origin.

7. Today we wanted to use gel electrophoresis to compare and analize our DNA, but it didn´t work. We don´t know why.

8. We have to present our ideas.

Well i had a lot of worries. And yes not everything is really working how i thought, but i am still in the process.

9. 30.11.17 I met with Jan in the Lab, because he had a lot of PDA (Potatostarch-Dextrose-Agar) medium, he offered me to use for the first try. I don´t have Photos of that Day, but here is, what came out a week later:

It was already contaminated (the little greenish dots) and began to roll up (in the upper right corner). Miga and Maike said, the experiment failed, it is too dry. So i cut a stripe of it to try out the ironing theory. Wich i had already tried out with some dry mycelium Jan had gave me to experiment: