Siliceous and Delicious

Finally had my training to use the sonicator this morning; it went quite well, there doesn’t seem to be too much to it, though I will need to buy some little Eppendorf tubes in which to do the sonicating, and figure out a way to rig up the tube and its ice bath so that it is held up under the probe. I came back to the office and grabbed lunch, but then didn’t find there to be quite enough time before I had to be back for lab meeting, so I tied up a few loose ends, and took a first look at some of the diatoms from the frozen vials I got earlier in the week under the microscope. I was not dazzled by what I saw—now, I’m no expert, but it struck me that the frustules on these things looked extremely thin and fragile, and they didn’t look none too large, either. Of course our microscope has no measurement system, or even calibrated graticules, so I don’t really know, but it seems to me a distinct possibility that the cells (at least the ones I looked at) were harvested right at the brink of the stationary phase, where silica was depleted and so the frustules are thin. That, of course, would suck ass for what I’m trying to do. In any case, the cells looked so flimsy to me that I couldn’t even tell whether the frustules were intact or not—there were no pores or striations to be seen, or any cellular structure really beyond the brownish blobs I took to be the plastids.