Last day before the exhibition! We entered the lab and opened the shaker thinking....this is why people don't work with living materials for exhibitions and certainly not in foreign countries....
But, hurray – both 200ml cultures had grown nice and cloudy overnight – we were in business!
We added isoamyl alcohol to our M9 culture with our Banana Bacteria system. Now – we had to move onto the bigger picture. First, we needed to wait until evening for the researchers, Krishna Kumar and Dr Sandeep Gaudana, to wrap up their experiments before we could work on the fermenter.
We began to prepare the setup and quickly realised that an additional size of silicon tubes were not available for the condenser. An outside provider was called in and our Techfest crew were told to travel with the provider for a same day pickup.
With the fermenter clean we also needed to locate two flasks for the chemostat setup, whilst the proposed plastic flasks were practical they were certainly not aesthetically pleasing.
After sharing more visuals with Sandeep and Krishna, they managed to dig out alternative glassware. Time was already ticking pass midnight. Our tubes had arrived but we had hit another problem - pumping power. After much effort, we could fill the condenser but would need to find a stronger pump to flush the liquid the following day.
The Techfest crew arrived to bring the fermenter machine to the exhibition space.
At 3am, we filled the reactor vessel with media as well as our reservoir and began closing up.
At 4am, we finally placed the reactor vessel in the autoclave and at 5am we went to bed. An hour later we were back in the lab.
The reactor vessel was inoculated with 200ml of culture and everything closed up. The vessels were carefully brought to the exhibition space about 400m away, and using a paraffin lamp we provided sterile conditions to hook up the system.
The system was working but it would take hours before the culture would be large enough to see stress as light.
The Banana Bacteria were in place, a simpler solution of putting two round bottom flasks with culture on a stand. The exhibition was opening.