Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Scientific Challenges
COSMOCROPS
Scientific Challenges of the Red Lab
Even through meticulous planning, high-tech equipment and excellent practical solutions, scientific work encounters several problems - some of which will never be fully solved.
To put it more sagely, everyone encounters challenges and how we deal with them is a central factor in defining the worth of our work.
The major issue in keeping on our described experimental course was the limitation of our physics equipment not being in a GMO-certified laboratory, and we spent quite some time trying to ensure that our tests on the wild types would be able to conclude anything on behalf of the modified strains.
As we can clearly see in the ideal gas law, the parameters of atmospheric substance, pressure and temperature are internally linked. This of course means that juggling them becomes a challenge, and especially when it comes to achieving both a high concentration of carbon dioxide and an extremely low pressure.
Likewise, transporting a large number of samples between buildings and testing them in a physics lab not built for handling biomass resulted in quite a few contamination issues.
We have also been limited in the scale of our operation, as the mars chamber, because of its small size, only allows for a very small amount of bacteria to be tested at one time, if we wish to examine other parameters than pressure and as such, much of our research has been more focused on this parameter.
As a way of increasing the number of pressure experiments, we made a DIY mini vacuum chamber consisting of used marmalade glasses and silicone plates. While this did work, it was a challenge to keep the container at a specific pressure when it went too low, and also difficult to insure a stable pressure within.
