Hello So as Dan has already mentioned last…

Hello!

So, as Dan has already mentioned, last week we spent a few days in the micro lab preparing nutrient agar plates to test our negative control of the polywipe sponges.
The polywipe sponges are out of date (Oct ’11) and therefore we needed to do a negative control to see if we could still use them to swab our bones.

We tested out 3 ways to put our sample onto the agar plate, a simple 0.1ml spread plate, another plate wiping the sponge itself onto the plate and the third way was by filtering the rest of the ringers solution onto a filter paper to place onto the agar. We learnt how to use the stomacher which is pretty simple so will be able to use that in the future for our project samples.
After incubating the plates at 37degrees for 24hours we could see some small colonies on the plates!! NOT WHAT WE WANTED! So then over the weekend we incubated them again this time at 25degrees to see if anything else grows.

Unfortunately it did 🙁 and now we can’t use the polywipe sponges and have to wait for new ones to be ordered in!!!

Today we checked up on our plates and recorded our observations, they seemed to be fungal growths on the plates so we sub-cultured them onto an MEA plate for curiosity as to where the fungi came from and possibly identify it. This has been incubated at 37degrees again and we will look at this tomorrow to see if anything has happened!