Siliceous and Delicious

Started the day with a meeting with Jacques. He started out quite pessimistic about the sonication project, highlighting the sense he’d gotten from the SEM images I sent him that the frustules were deforming in a ductile rather than a brittle fashion. However, since there were a lot of small fragments in the sonicated samples I looked at, in all likelihood brittle failure did occur (it’s unlikely they were all rubble before I started sonicating them), suggesting a glimmer of hope that something may come of it. The suggestion was to try again, but with less or no sonication at all. To resuspend the cells after centrifuging, Jacques suggested using a shaker table, which we promptly procured by “borrowing” one from a neighboring lab. He didn’t have the sulfuric acid, oxalic acid, and potassium permanganate that a recipe for cleaning diatoms (by Hasle and Fryxell, 1970) suggested, so I’ll have to find those elsewhere (Colleen’s lab, maybe).

With a productive conversation under my belt to start the day, I thought I’d move on to the diatom morphospace project, as I had promised myself yesterday. But, it was not to happen—distractions here, distractions there, an unavoidable trip to lunch to celebrate Ben Gill’s paper finally making into Nature, family emails and phone calls, and somehow it was all over before it even started.