So, i keep forgetting to post but Dan has been up to date which is good so you can get the idea of what we have been doing!
Week 4 consisted mostly of waiting for our supplies to come in again and taking student as producer literally by experimenting with cotton swabs on some of the bones after handling to see how long the bacteria maintains on the bones. The results for these came in all shapes colours and sizes and so we were unsure if they were viable and not contaminated. We also helped out an an open day and workshops teaching the students how to age, sex and determine stature of the skeletons.
Week 5 we continued the experimenting into the cotton swabs and the bacteria living on the bones. However Wednesday we actually found all our supplies and so the micro side of the project finally began!!!
We plated up agar and made ringers in prep for our swabs. Starting with swabbing the bones with the polywipe sponges for a background check to see what was already on the bones, doing 5 repeats of 5 bones so a total of 25 nutrient agar plates, these were incubated at 37degrees for 48 hours and looked at again on Friday! Obviously as Dan has already said, the results were weird! research for you. They could have been from contamination, if not then our bones have lots of different types of bacteria/fungus present!! We sub-cultured most of the plates onto several different types of agar and we also took samples and gram stained them to see if we could identify what we had…this left us even more confused!
Now we are in our final week of the project and yesterday we cleaned 5 of the bones with ethanol (50%, 75% and 95%) and let the ethanol soak in to destroy bacteria, then swabbed with the polywipe sponges and placed in ringers solution, each plate had 0.1ml pipetted on and there was again 5 repeats for each bone. The same bones were then handled with gloves for 5 minutes and then repeated the swabbing steps to see what grows on bones handled with gloves. Today we made up 60 more agar plates for use tomorrow when we will clean another 5 bones and handle these with bare hands and see how they differ, like the project is called….gloves or no gloves?
We will have to wait and see!!