Author: Sophie :)

So…the last post on the blog by me! Finally finished our UROS project today! Excited to have a bit of summer left! Had an amazing time and it’s been a great experience and i’ve learnt alot. I’ve learnt all the bones in the human body, and many anthropology skills and techniques to age sex and determine stature and these skills i will keep with me to help in my final year! I’ve also met lovely people in the micro lab that i probably wouldn’t have got chance to if i hadn’t done this project so for that i am thankful! Being able to work with my peers and lecturers has been a good experience and being able to work in a lab for a long length of time!

On to the project results…this week we swabbed the bones after being cleaned with ethanol and then we handled one set of bones with gloves on and one set without gloves and swabbed these too to come to some kind of conclusion as to wearing gloves affects contamination on the bone. The results mainly pointed in this direction with the swabs taken after handling without gloves gave more bacterial growth than that with gloves on.

We weren’t able to identify any of the bacteria in this project but it will make for an interesting project next summer maybe!

Thanks again everyone involved, its been great! 🙂 Enjoy your summers!!!

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!!

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!

Good evening! 🙂
I haven’t really wrote about what we have done so far on our project but after reading Dan and Jacob’s entries I can see they have pretty much covered everything.

But in my own words, in week 1 we learnt how to fill out inventory forms correctly when looking over skeletal remains which included noting whether bones were present or absent. This was quite easy to get the hang of after the first skeleton. There were 4 skeletons laid out for us to look at and get to bases with the names of all the bones properly and where they lay in the human structure; so our next task was to lay out a skeleton for ourselves and understand how to differ between left and right bones etc. After getting to grips with the skeletons we started looking into how you work out the stature of the skeleton, by looking at the leg bones (femur & tibia), and how to determine age (using the pubic symphises on the pelvis and teeth if any were present) and to determine sex (using 5 main features on the skull and also the pelvis). Jacob, Dan and I all went to visit St. Katherine’s which is a church converted to a small museum. We went here as a lot of the bones we have in the lab are from St Katherine’s, however, it didn’t prove to be necessary as there wasn’t much information on the actual bones.

Last week was spent mostly doing inventory of all the bones in the lab and deciding which ones needed cleaning and so learnt the cleaning methods, which are quite simple for mud covered bones, being warm water and a toothbrush! But I imagine cleaning densely covered bones is more difficult. The rest of last week was spent doing our own research to prepare for our start doing the microbiology work, such as researching the best sampling method and the best agar to transfer it too along with looking at what types of bacteria are already present on bones and our hands to see if these can cause degradation.

Now comes the exciting stuff and will keep you all up to date at the end of next week!
Have a good week! 🙂