Well, this week was pretty brief. I basically show up at work, dive into reading a ton of PDFs, cuss out my Adobe Reader because it always crashes when I load more than 10 files, and then forget to eat lunch. Sometime in the afternoon, I get hungry, eat my lunch by 3 or 4 pm, and then continue reading and try to get to a stopping point. My wife is a saint for taking care of Hannah and supporting my studies. With this funding application I am turning in, one of the requirements is that I have my candidacy exams completed by February 20th. This date is sneaking up on me quicker than I'd like to admit and so my time is divvied into reading manuscripts to prepare my proposal, reviewing pathways for main nutrition, growth and health signaling in livestock, and recruiting members of my doctoral committee. I think in many fields of study, this last-minute recruiting would be more difficult but my faculty members already know me pretty well and are quite willing to be a part of the committee. So far, I have three members for sure because they will be submitted on the grant and agreed back in December and I need to secure one more.
A lot of people have asked me if I'm studying for my candidacies. I've never been known for studying and I'm not about to start now. I call it studying, but what I really do is try to look at the big picture. What systems influence others? What are the bigger concepts of dairy nutrition related to my work? If my committee asks me to defend my ideas, where did I get them from? How can I use my knowledge of statistics to solve problems? But in the traditional impression of studying as a memorization of notes over years of classwork, hell no I'm not going to do that. If I don't know that stuff now, there's no way I will memorize it by next month anyhow. It's more important for me to be able to relate my work to the real world and to cite relevant literature. So I'm basically turning myself into an encyclopedia of manuscripts in nutrition and methane research.
One thing that came up when we had conversation about me taking my candidacy exams was the need to take one more class, another microbiology class taught within our department by a professor on my committee. I was hoping to take it last year but it was cancelled for lack of enrollment. So I'm enrolled in one, yep count 'em, class for this spring semester. And it's been about a year since I took any classes. It feels so weird to have a schedule and I had to set an alarm reminder on my calendar just to remember to go to my class upstairs.
I think our professor was a bit worried that some students were hazy on the old details from microbiology classes so our first week has been a review of basic microbiology. One of those things was gram staining. For those of you who don't know, gram staining basically entails staining bacteria with one stain, then washing it off and adding a different one. Gram positive bacteria have a thick cell wall that will retain the first stain whereas gram negative bacteria have a double structure that is thinner with less peptidoglycan and more attachments on the outside instead. Gram staining is a quick identifier for different groups of bacteria and typically these groups of bacteria have different susceptibilities and other characteristics. For example, many gram positive bacteria are involved in cellulose degradation in the rumen and many starch digesters are gram negative. Pathogens such as Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella are also gram negative. So gram staining is a tool, and our professor wanted to show students how it was done to refresh their memory.
So we used this video?
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