Cultivating Live Material in the Laboratory

The Wet Lab Makerspace invites you to enjoy our Summer A 2026 Community Project! These projects are open enrollment opportunities to practice laboratory skills. The makerspace provides materials, protocols, instruction, and support to guide you as you through foundational workflows in the biological and chemical sciences. By completing these non-credit courses, students can earn digital badges, demonstrating their mastery of core skills.

In Summer A 2026, our Community Project will be Cultivating Live Material in the Laboratory, which will introduce cultivation workflows for common laboratory organisms and non-organismal living material. The care and cultivation of living material is a foundational skill in biology. Students will have the opportunity to cultivate a range of common laboratory organisms, including bacteria, algae, nematodes, planaria, and ferns. For each type of material, students will have the opportunity to learn about how to maintain nutrient and environmental conditions and to practice a core experiment or assay.

Topics to be Covered

Students will receive an orientation to important lab safety topics, including handling biological material, waste disposal, and handling hazardous chemicals.

Cultivating bacteria is foundational to many laboratory activities. In this week, we will practice culturing E. coli on liquid and solid media. We will then quantify bacterial density via spectroscopy, serial dilution, and plate counting.

In this week, we will cultivate the alga Chlorella vulgaris. We will then quantify its lipid content via staining and spectroscopy.

In this week, we will practice the care and cultivation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. We will then conduct a phototaxis assay on two strains that differ in their response to light.

Students will feed and examine planarian flatworms. We will then conduct a regeneration experiment.

In this week, students will cultivate and observe the homosporous fern Ceratopteris richardii. We will then induce spermatogenesis and observe fertilization.

Pacing & Time Commitment

Students must enroll in a specific weekly time slot. In-person instruction will occur during that time slot. Completion of each week’s assignment will likely require that students return to the lab to work independently at least one additional day per week.

Students will have the opportunity to earn two badges:

Participant
Basic

Fill out this form to enroll!

Q: Algae

In this week, we will cultivate the alga Chlorella vulgaris. We will then quantify its lipid content via staining and spectroscopy.

Safety begins the week of May 11th!

Enrollment will be capped at 50 students. We look forward to seeing you all for an exciting summer of science!