Preparation work 2

Today our project has a great progress! We had met with Dr. Ben Libberton to learn about his present project that is related with our project topic. I really appreciate him for all the information he provided! It is really important for us and has great help to us understand project well.

Here are records of what Dr. Ben Libberton provided. All information is under the property of Dr. Libberton.

Firstly, his project was about observing the mobility of bacteria in microfluidics to solve mathematical problems, which is quite similar with ours. Mathematical puzzles such as the maze can be solved by bacteria when the base number of the problem is so large that solving process by computer would take a long time. The essential part is the junction channel built for mathematical problems. I think we need to to focus this part in our project, and try to figure out the thesis before the lab work. There are two types junction, three folks and four folks.

The bottleneck at this stage basically is some types of bacteria have the phenomenon called swarming that they may block one particular channel consequently terribly influence the results. Solutions for this are two, changing the types of bacteria, and changing the media or taxis. Actually, I think this two are relevant, because you may need to change the nutritive subtanceof agar to obtain a different taxis when you switch the bacteria in use. One part of his current experiment is to modify the sort of bacteria.

Some other fundamental concepts includes the constructing process of the PDMS, which is applying the microlithography technology on the silicon vafer. Construction may contains the step the UV radiaction. Next stage we would figure out the exact steps of construction.

We also have learned a numbers of names of bacteria, for examples, pseudomonas, serratia, and flavobaterium. Some common bacteria already known are E.coli, cyanobacteria and spirochetes. These bacteria has differnet taxis, but generally most of them have the chemotaxis. Other taxis that can be utilized are phototaxis, geotaxis and magnetotaxis. The chemical and physical properties of the substratum will be modified for specific requirement I think.

I have borrowed some books about the MICROFLUIDICS to do more reference acknowledgment. Dr. Libberton was willing to provide us some reference about the researching problem like the mathematical puzzles or something like that. Knowledge of bacteria, biochemistry lab work process, and some other parts related to this project will be complemented in the following Chrismas break. Oh, hope the God would help me to accomplish all of this.

Here again express my appreciation to Dr. Libberton.

                                                                                                            Wrote on 13/ 12/ 2011