Scanning Electron Microscope.

This last week was an amazing one for our experience in our 5 months intership at the University of Georgia at Athens, Georgia.
Our professor Dr. Nagamani spend 2 weeks of hard work with us at the laboratory, he found very interesting facts about our preliminary results obtained from our research on anaerobic co-digestion of dairy manure-algae and poultry litter-dairy manure, so we decided to make a checking on a fluorescence microscope, we found a very pretty Methanosarcina archea present in most of the reactors. So this lead us to realize a more specific analysis, and we had one of greatest experience in life science, checking our anaerobic consortium in an Electron Microscope or Scanning Electron Microscope.
We realized all the process on preparing our samples to this fascinating analysis.
It consist in 1) Fixation of our sample, this step is to maintain intact all the sample structure, 2) Critical Point Drying, this is necessary to keep our sample without moisture after fixation because it can affect our sample structure. 3) Gold coating, we realized a gold coating to make our sample visible to the Electron microscope, without this it can not be possible to observe the sample structure. We realized this sample preparation in the Electron Microscopy Laboratory, Division of Biological Sciences and Center for Ultrastructural Research, under the direction of Dr. John Shields. And we realized the scanning at the School of Veterinary in the Electron Microscope Laboratory. We found a lot of small aggregation form of methanosarcina sp in the dairy manure-algae reactors, and a lot of big aggregation forms of methanosarcina sp in the poultry litter-dairy manure reactors. We want to say thank you to our professor Dr. Nagamani Balagurusamy for all his support and suggestions to our research. And I just want to say that we have a lot of work to do in our laboratory (Bioremediation Group Laguna) to make our planet a better place to live and make all the effort to convert our lab in one of the most important Environmental Biotechnology labs in Mexico and why not one the best in the world...