It's definitely crunch time for me in the Templeton Lab. Not that I necessarily have anything driving me (a cowboy with a ten-gallon hat and a bull whip running a six-horse wagon across the desert in search of a gold mine he'd heard told of just popped into my mind!), but I do feel the need to start getting more work done during the week to leave more time for play on the weekends.
This week I'm focusing on microscopy of all of my static cultures, voltammetry for sulfur and manganese species in water samples, and prepping for SSRL in a few weeks. I have some sulfide gradient tube cultures I made late last year that need to be revisited to see if anything is still thriving within them. I'm planning on trying to digest some of the agarose in some static cultures to isolate sulfur compounds for x-ray absorption spectroscopy. I have no idea yet if that's going to be a path worth going down.
Voltammetry is still coming along for me. I need to make more time for doing these analyses and for getting more data. I'd like to be confident with analyzing waters for sulfide, sulfur, sulfate, and Mn(II) by the end of the week, but that might be a little ambitious.
When it comes to preparing samples for XANES analyses at SSRL, who knows where that will take me. I have two thin sections of Borup material I took with me to Switzerland and I have four recently finished thin sections that I still need to analyze microscopically to see if they are any good. I might try to prep two more thin sections to take to the beamline for commissioning the sulfur microprobe. If this new beamline turns out good results, it will be nice to travel to SSRL more often and analyze Borup samples. We'll see soon where that technique will take me.
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