I am continuing with my investigation of collagen extracted from animal tails that are otherwise designated ‘waste’. I started with the rat tails at SymbioticA in 2006. (See here). Last week I went out to a sheep farm while they were docking the lambs tails. The farmer has saved 200 for me from the previous [...]

Well I’ve been on holiday for the past month and now I’m just organising everything at SymbioticA to finish up my year here and move back to Melbourne. Yesterday I emptied out all my roo tail dialysis bags to dry the collagen. I already knew that I had got alot more collagen from the roo [...]

I have been working on a new iteration of the bone transducer using my own water cooled bone saw creation – a dremel over a sink with a stream of water from the tap. The only problem is I get totally drenched in the process as the circular dremel blade throws the water up at [...]

On Friday I dried four more lots of rats tail collagen. It definitely seems to be the case that some tails contained more collagen than others. First I picked open the knots in the tubes so that I would be able to use them again. Then I squeezed out the gel into sample weighing trays [...]

I was making use of some rats tails that someone else had frozen the other day and I loved the way in which they were packed in the 50ml tube.

I have been freeze drying my E.coli in eppendorf tubes and when it comes out all at once it looks a bit like a bullet or a stick of lipstick because of its red colour. I though this was quite funny as my friend Adele has been making poo shaped lipstick as part of her [...]

I decided to try extracting some collagen from a kangaroo tail yesterday. It turned out to be very similar to a rats tail in structure but of course many times larger with much bigger tendons. This morning when I went to check on the tendons stirring in Acetic acid they had swelled up so much [...]

I was showing new SymbioticA resident Jenny Boulboulle my freeze dried E.coli and we were talking about how strange it was that this seemingly lifeless material actually contained the potential to be reconstituted into thousands of bacteria. To test this I put a fragment of the freeze dried bugs into media and incubated it overnight [...]

I did my first evaporation of the rats tail collagen extract into a film yesterday. I squeezed the gelated collagen out of the dialysis tubes into a dish and left it in a drying oven at 50 degrees Celsius overnight. When I pulled it out of the oven it looked like this: You can see [...]

Well I took my first lot of freeze dried E.coli off the freeze drier this morning. I experimented with two methods – scraping the bugs off the media plates, or using the liquid culture. I found that to filter the liquid culture was virtually impossible (I have since learned that you need to centrifuge it [...]