Lab Time!

 Last semester I wrote about and presented on an experiment involving the effects of UV radiation on bacteria.  The launch in the previous post was my chance to finally run the experiment!  And it was successful, in that the system designed to bring the bacteria into the stratosphere and back to earth to be recovered did so without and leaks or contamination.

This was a proof of concept flight so the data set is relatively small and part of the experiment was developing protocols that would be successful for extracting data.

It was hypothesized that the inactivated flight and lab UV samples would experience the greatest amount of DNA fragmentation and that the null samples, live and inactivated, would experince the least.  The results of the DNA fragmentation analysis of the samples came back as expected, as seen below.

With these promising results and the protocols in place used to acquire them the groundwork has been laid to expand this experiment on the next launch.  The data retrieved by the atmospheric profiling system provides the information necessary to set the controls for temperature, pressure, and humidity in the lab.   With this exploratory set of data control variables for the biological experiment can be more precisely set and analyzed in a new more expansive experiment.

Below you can see pictures from the lab work and the final results.