Purpose:

The purpose of todays experiment was to isolate ciliates from a soil sample with centrifuges.

Procedure:

1. Use a p1000 micropipette to transfer 2 ml of the given soil sample into one of the tubes with 8mL of Ludox in it.
2. Then pipette 2mL of dyed water into the tube.
3. Take the weight of your groups tube and compare it to your adjacent group (if one groups weighs less than the other than the group with less should add water until the weights are matched).
4. After Centrifuge the tubes at x4300g for 15 min.
5. Next we carefully pipetted the cell laye that was in between the two layers in the tube.
6. After we pipetted 3-10 microliter drops to concavity slides so that we could check them under microscopes for ciliates.
7. After centrifuge the microcentrifuge for 10 minutes.
8. Then carefully remove the liquid from the tube leaving the pellet.
9. Store the Pellet for next lab.

Results: 

Our conical tube weighed 21.1g originally so we added .3 g of water to balance out with our adjacent group 21.4g. We were able to find a small ciliate layer in our tube and extracted it to view. My partner was able to find this.

Conclusion: 

Our group was able to find something in our tube. We had a rather small cell layer in our sample so our pellet was a little smaller. Overall this lab went well, it was enjoyable to follow the process of Ludox centrifuging and examining our samples. I feel I have a greater understanding of Ludox centrifugation now.