Watch me present my work at the 2015 SES Student Symposium, timestamp = 01:38:53

While at the Semester in Environmental Science at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), I had the opportunity to develop my own independent research project to work on for the last 5 weeks of the semester.

With Dr. Zoe Cardon and Dr. Joseph Vallino, I developed a project to investigate why their Algae-to-Methane bioreactor had dropped in methane production in recent weeks.

Question: What affects methane production in the Algae Bioreactor?

• H1: glucose stimulates decomposition and methane production (priming)

• H2: acetate stimulates methane production (direct)

• H3: autoclaving stimulates decomposition and methane production

I used incubations and destructively harvested incubation tubes for each treatment at 5 time points.

Findings:

• Trends show that autoclaved algae could make more methane
• Autoclaved algae solution produced more CO2 – suggesting that there was more decomposition
• Acetate and glucose did not make more methane
• Glucose & acetate inhibited methane production
• Large effect for small amount added
• CO2 plateaus and until last time point - shows that methanogens begin using CO2

Marine Biological Laboratory's (MBL) Semester in Environmental Science (SES): - one of the best semesters of my undergraduate career! https://www.mbl.edu/ses/