Thursday, December 10, 2020 - 6:04 am
POTSDAM Clarkson has loaned one of its Ultra-Low Temperature (ULT) freezers to Canton-Potsdam Hospital to await the first arrivals of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. The vaccines must be stored at the ultra-cold temperature of -70 degrees Celsius, or about -94 Fahrenheit.
Clarkson’s ULT freezer comes from Biology Professor Susan Bailey’s Experimental Evolution and Bioinformatics Lab. This freezer normally holds bacteria and DNA samples from her evolution experiments.
“These experiments explore how bacteria evolve in response to different types of environments, including looking at the evolution of antibiotic resistance. We preserve and freeze the bacteria periodically over the course of an evolution experiment to keep a kind of fossil record of their different stages of evolution. When we freeze them at ultra-low temperatures, they are preserved in a way such that we can thaw and reanimate them at a later time for furth