Purchased ACA from Hourai

So many plans this weekend but somehow managed to go to Hourai to pick up the ACA. This chemical, 500ml, costs me RM700! Duuhhh...

Went to the lab tonight and just fill up the record book. Only sowed 3 species... perghh so slow!

Not very productive...

Lab Update

Nothing much! Hj Naza is still sowing orchid seeds. There are so many of them and this may take weeks to complete. From these mother flasks we will cultivate hundreds if not thousands more flasks. So far we are using 3 types of media, M39, M16 and M26k. Seeds sown using M39 were mostly burst seed pods and ACA used has already expired. Thus, there is not much progress. But most 'green seed pods' (not burst yet) show good progress. They are sown without using ACA. So can it be that expired ACA is not effective anymore?

M39 Status... Unsuccessful?!

Hmmm... it has been more than 10 days and the spore has not yet germinated. What's the reason? What went wrong? I know that there are few things that we did not really follow closely i.e. testing using filtered water instead of distilled water. Using expired ACA. Are there any other factors that we have overlooked? Perhaps low lighting or not enough lighting hour? We have rectified that issues for M09 and we'll see the difference later.

Talking about contamination, Mikail said usually there will be 10%-15% chances of contamination. How about ours? For M39, so far there are 32 contaminated flasks. That is about 16% and can be considered very high. We must be careful with the next batch.

We talked to Reen (from Hourai) about ordering new ACA. 500ml of ACA costs about RM700! Wow.. that's expensive but what can we do.. we need it!

Will it germinate?

Contaminated flasks from M39