Week 48 - Growing...

...like a weed. Our little girl is definitely all that and the end of this week marked her 1 month birthday. Of course, with all the hussle of getting ourselves out the door for 4-H camp, we didn't have time to celebrate it in style, but will postpone that "special moments" whiskey on the rocks for another milestone month in the near future. Thankfully, my wife had the foresight to create these super cute little blocks with colored numbers to mark the passing of time. And thankfully twice, she had the good  memory to take the picture you see on the right. That hit the background on my phone faster than bugs on a Ferrari grill. Hannah has such wonderful expression and personality for 1 month. She is certainly a treasure to cherish (just like her mom!).

Little baby girl is fast asleep with mom at 4-H camp this week.

Speaking of growing, we have been growing up just a few groups of protozoa in the lab, and while other members work on new filtration techniques for live rumen protozoa (since they are anaerobic, this is no easy feat), we have been working on hooking up a camera to a microscope in another lab. This has been met with limited success, starting with a QCapture setup which I have to say was found to be lacking. The firewire takes forever to communicate lighting adjustments and realtime viewing/focus, while the image clarity is challenging and the pixelation is disappointing. Limited software support for video capture also prevents this from being a viable option.

So then I pulled out all the cameras from my house and took them down to work. Without adaptors for the open view, the video cameras and point-and-shoot cameras I brought were completely worthless. However, the old Canon Rebel XT was finally able to capture some first images, and examples of these are below. The SLR allows for much better light control and the manual aspect of the camera combined with rudimentary memory of camera function was all I needed to get some pictures taken. Well, that and some electric tape. Since the camera was on the microscope, but open (no lens) and balanced, I wanted to prevent it from being trashed in this fragile state. The electric tape leaves little residue and served to secure the camera body against the microscope opening to prevent dust contamination to either object and to prevent me from clutzing my camera right off the top to its death (almost happened once).

Isotrichid amidst entodiniomorphs, notice the cilia moving all over the body.

For scale, the entire distance on the gridline is 1000 um.

While these pictures are great, there are still 2 main drawbacks which we need to address on image capture. First, my camera doesn't take video. Next week when I am back from camp, my intern will be bringing in her camera to take some video. It is a Nikon D5000 and promises great improvements in light sensitivity, color and video capture over my current situation. Plus, she was gracious enough to offer it for free since it benefits her undergrad research project. Second, we still cannot capture dark field contrast images. The dark field stage is important to me because I think it offers the best opportunity down the road for projecting movement and correcting for protozoal dodging between particle clumps of various origin. Right now the protozoal movement seems to be random and we classify their activity based on chemoattraction or random motion (you can see a rough video below, thanks to the iPhone). However, when you examine the protozoal movement on dark field where bacterial colonies are highlighted (2nd video below, kinda looks like a starry night sky), then you notice that the movement is less random than we supposed. Instead, they are also dodging around lots of different particles in the space provided. It is important when we proceed with our motility analysis to take this into consideration, especially since we will be scoring them on 2 distinct categories: distance traveled versus location change over time.

This has been a generally productive week at work, as we were also trained to use the new GreenFeed system. This system is automatically programmed to read RFID tagged dairy cattle and dose them with a treat (conditioning reflex). While they are eating it, it measures their gas production and we will be using it for some large-scale live animal projects. It might sound like a bit of work, but the design is really creative and effective, and we will be able to do some great research with it. Even though I'm probably not the primary research student to use the equipment, I am excited to be a part of this progressive methodology.

Our lab attending a training meeting for the new cattle gas sampler.

This week also marked our 3rd year of partnership with OFBF for the Pelotonia.