The Roast of Lab Equipment 3

Thank you one and all for comming to this event.

Today we all gather to pay tribute to a very dear friend of ours. A friend who works tierlessly every day and every night in the name of science. Sure, he may have a cold heart, and screams at us if we bother him to often, but frankly we wouldn't have him any other way.

Today we would like to pay tribute to the -80 freezer.

The -80 freezer is a pretty straitforward and easy to use device. It is just like a normal freezer, except that it gets much colder. If you can't guess, the -80 freezer gets down to about -80 degrees.

I HAD NO IDEA!

Now, why would we ever need a freezer that goes down to -80 degrees? It's quite simple really. Lets start from the top. 

 Our samples come from the Antarctic. We bring them back here to Maine to culture, grow, and do various work with. However, over the years we have accumulated a lot of samples. A lot as in, hundreds. What do we do with all of these samples? We can't throw them away because we may still need them for future projects. We can't just keep hundreds of petri dishes because they take up a lot of room, they would eventually use up all of the nutrients they have, and because petri dishes are incredibly difficult to keep sterile. 

So what do we do?

We take a small amount of the cells and put them into a test tube with some nutrients in it. 

Then we stuff them into the freezer. The freezer is really cold, so the organisms are frozen solid and can't grow. However, these are organisms from the Antarctic. They are used to extreemly cold temperatures so they can be frozen solid without dying. The tubes are small so we can put lots of them in a very small area, they don't grow so they don't use up their nutrients, and the tubes are very good at keeping contaminents out. 

Essentially the same thing. 

If we should ever need to grow a specific sample again, we just take a small scoop out of the tube and wipe it onto a plate. Within a few days the fungi will start to grow all over the plate. 

-80 freezer, for keeping our samples safely and neatly stored, we thank you and award you with the golden mushroom and a hikau written in your honor. 

Negative eighty

is cold, oh so very cold

even for fungi

See you all later!

By Ben Segee