It has been awhile since I wrote on the blog last, mainly because I haven't been able to log in to the website for the last two weeks ... AAnyway, two weekends ago I went to Cordoba with Randy, Ashley and Rachel. We got to see La Mezquita, which today is a huge beautiful cathedral built inside a huge mosque. Quick history: at first it was a small cathedral, and then the Moors conquered Spain and in the spirit of tolerance, tore down the cathedral and built a huge mosque in its place. And then when Spain retook the country, continuing in the spirit of tolerance, they tore down part of the mosque to build a huge cathedral in the middle of the mosque. It is very beautiful and its huge pillar fields make it unique.
The city of Cordoba today is not as big as it once was, but it is still a very nice small city in which you don't need a motor vehicle to get around. We also got to see the Palace of Catholic Kings, which is like a mini La Alhambra, but as the name implies, the buildungs are more in the Roman style rather than in the Moorish style. Pictures from La Mezquita:
This is me on top of a tower in Cordoba with La Mezquita in the background.
This picture shows the intertwining of Moorish and Christian styles.
The pillar fields
One side room.
The same side room as the previous picture. The room is number 38, and there are about 58 total rooms that are as beautiful as that room.
The cathedral inside the mosque.
Pictures from The Palace of Catholic Kings:
A Roman mosiac. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it was done entirely from rocks of varying colors. Which is very impressive considering it looks like a painting but is actually just different colored rocks.
A statue of what appears to be one of the kings, a bishop of some sort and a messenger of some sort.
A picture from the gardens at the palace.
The previous week in lab, we finally ran some samples through the NMR, samples from the Stereocaulon antarctica species. From the TLC plates I ran, I had three compounds that may have been pure. I continued with the extractions with the Ramalina terebrata species, trying to get everything finished before we leave for the states.
Also with Ramalina I ran bioassays to determine if the extracts we have been collecting are biologically active. The bioassay determined the amount of growth that a coleptile (more or less plant stem cells) experienced when left for a day in a solution of buffer and extract. In the project we are looking to identify secondary metabolites, and if the lichens have compounds that can stunt plant growth, then that is a good sign that we should be able to find secondary metabolites in the lichens.
OK so this wasn't everything. I'll include the rest in the next post.
