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Project Bioreactor: Sea Water Collection and Sterilization System

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I live 3 miles away from a boat launch on the very southern tip of Puget Sound. The launch is adjacent to seagrass meadows that are the subject of my investigations.

In order to get the same sea water as the meadows, I built this system for pumping 5 gallons of sea water into a tank that’s strapped into the back of my Volkswagon Beetle. The setup should take no more than 5 minutes and the pump is advertised to pump 1 Gallon per minute.

I’ll collect water at high tide but I’m worried about clogging the pump so I’ve installed a filter along the hose leading to the pump’s intake and I’ll probably fasten a Whiffle Ball to the business-end of the intake hose.

Once I’ve sterilized the tanks and everything that will come in contact with it, I’ll need to sterilize the sea water I’ve collected from Puget Sound.

I’ll be using two vacuum filter apparatus with 20 micron filters that I’ll replace every 1000 mL.

Because my autoclave (pressure cooker) is only 8 inches high, I’m limited to four 500 mL bottles.

I plan on using the same pressure cooker to sterilize the soil I’ll collect to plant the seagrass rhyzomes in.

This is going to be so tedious!

Hobby: Water Sampling and analysis

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I made a series of instructional videos for a handful of Middle School students during the pandemic. I was told they were useful but I was never aske to make any more.

Hobby: Biology

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This is part of the BSL 1 lab I built in 2017 for learning Biology.

Since it’s completion, I’ve been growing safe strains of e.coli, running gels, mini-preps, PCR and other standard fare for learning basic biological methods.  I’m weak on the chemistry so there are a lot of Lewis diagrams in my notebook,  but I’m strong on bioinformatics so I enjoy it more and write about it less.

I figure that for every hour I spend seated on the lab stool in a lab coat, I spend 6 hours reading (and re-reading), 2 hours writing in my notebooks at the desk and another hour pounding my head against the white board trying to figure out why my experiments failed.