Week 70 - Manganese

This past week (written for December 15-21), my cousin tagged me in a post on Facebook, telling me how tolerant I used to be of their shenanigans and whatnot. I thought I would throw the photo in here as proof - I was nice, once upon a time. You can see him laying backwards in the right hand side of the picture, and the youngest one sitting on my back. For some reason I was just a jungle gym to them, and all they wanted for their birthday every year was for my and my siblings to spend the night and hang out with all four of them. What a crew it was, 7 of us tearing around the house. I always hoped I would be a good example for them, unfortunately, one of them passed away suddenly from a stroke when I was a freshman in college. She is missed all the time, but at least I know that she has company up above.

As we wrapped up period 3 of CO35 this week, I had a sudden thought while I was taking out my contacts at home. The "aha" moment was precipitated by my very aggressive contact solution I have to use to keep my eyes healthy. In the old days, I could go for days, even over a week without taking out my 2-week contact lenses, and rub them full of dirt and smoke from camping without being bothered at all. But as time passed, and they were beat up more often - sunscreen/sand in the grand canyon, dust from the dairy farm feeding job, whatever I brought back from Mexico... - my eyes would burn with the slightest provocation. It got to the point where I finally had to go to the doctor and he recommended weeks of no contacts and no exposure to dust. Of course, living in Michigan in the summer, this meant time off from work and spent inside only - boring. But the other option was eventually not being able to wear contacts ever again, or being blind. Knowing there are many people who would give anything to be able to see, I had to do what I could to save my eyes. This included upgrading to a more expensive eye care solution. I agonized about the price, and the amount of solution I had to use to refresh the contacts every night, but after even a few weeks I could feel a huge difference in my eyes. Yes, folks, this is my open endorsement of Clear Care as the reason I enjoy wearing my contacts again. My eyes have been healthier, my scar tissue has healed and I am so much happier.

The science behind the product is pretty cool, too. Basically, the little stubby piece at the bottom is manganese oxide, and this serves as a catalyst to convert hydrogen peroxide in the solution to water in 6 hours. The hydrogen peroxide sterilizes your lenses, killing bacteria and the water is there in the morning. Well, since manganese oxide is oxidized and available to pick up hydrogen, it got me thinking that maybe if we could just increase the manganese fed in animal diets, the cost would be minimal but the alternative source for hydrogen sinking would not be toxic or have other side effects like so many of the methane mitigation strategies proposed. I searched briefly through the literature for a day and learned that we really have no idea about manganese in the animal diet, except that it's important. We have certainly not tested it as an option for methane competition. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work that well because it is not as thermodynamically competitive for H2 as other compounds, so less punch for the money. But since I have a lot of manganese laying around, I thought I would test it out at work anyhow. I've heard from the interns before that I make science seem a bit more fun than they would have imagined, and that makes me feel a bit proud inside. So when we toss around ideas like that and I just say, "Well, we can test it", everyone gets a bit excited about it.

I wanted to know how much manganese might be consumed in a day by the microbes, and if the manganese could be toxic to them as well. So I had to first remove the piece from an old contact case, then weigh it and find a method to attach it where it would not spin around in the fermenters and eventually lodge under the magnet, destroying the fermenter jar. Random experiments are great when they don't destroy equipment. So I used a rubberband and attached it to a metal rod, then stuck the metal rod through a drilled out rubber stopper. Voila! The manganese could be dosed and I could see control vs. responses to the manganese in different fermenters. I fed them and waited until the next day. Unfortunately, there was no difference in methane production, which is good because it means that I didn't have toxic enough manganese levels, but I am betting that the surface area of the solid vs a powder has a different response, because the effective dose would be changed. This isn't really the main area of my research, but if there is anyone out there interested in taking the idea further, you can thank me later. It is possible the idea could work, but I don't think so because you would have to dose this every day to mitigate methane and either feed very high concentrations of manganese or manually dose the animal. The bolus idea as I tried was the only one with cost-effective potential because you could dose once with a known quantity of days where manganese would be present. Oh well, just another fun day in the lab.

Hannah discovered the musical snowglobe my parents gave me when I was in middle school.

Home front news is gonna be pretty short today, but all you need to know is that Hannah and Betsy are becoming better friends. I think it is still too early for Betsy to view Hannah as a food source but I think she has just become more comfortable with all the random noises and movements, and accepted that Hannah will be a more permanent member of the family. We are so blessed to have a dog so patient with Hannah, we always joked that we had baby-proofed the dog back when I chased her around on the floor and pulled her ears at all hours of the night, but maybe that really did help. All I know is she is so great with Hannah and when I hear about people having to get rid of their pet because of compatibility issues, I feel bad for them and am grateful we have such a keeper. Adopting Betsy from the shelter wasn't just good for her; she was a great thing for us.