Author: Deborah

Another great day in the lab. Completed stabs and slopes, now onto bacterial cultures i haven’t even heard of so monday is going to be fun. Understand a little more now why we use sybr green dye in electrophoresis and why it is sometimes better to use Ethidium bromide. Gram stained a known culture of E.coli using Lugol’s, will compare it on monday against a slide stained with Grams iodine, interested in what the difference is. Loving the research aspect of lab work.

A rather sleepy blog today, waiting around in the lab for things to be ready is very tiring. With Rachael Simpson, we finished making our broth cultures into stabs and slopes and left them to incubate overnight. A slope is a universal jar filled (in this case) with nutrient agar and left to set at an angle, the target bacteria is innoculated onto the surface of the set, sloped agar, giving a larger surface area for the culture to form a bacterial lawn, these can then be stored for couple of months. A stab jar is a bijou jar also filled with nutrient agar, the target culture’s cells are stabbed a coulpe of times into the agar, then incubated overnight. The bijou jar can be stored for years. Both these procedures were carried out under aseptic techniques.

Hi, today we gram stained a few more cultures and confirmed what they were. We then made them into broth culture and incubated them at 37C overnight. Just pesky M.luteus to identify (which is rachael simpsons pet project). Learning so much about colony morphology. Also learned that not many people like to clear n clean their workspace when they leave!! working with bacteria, this is an important step/process.

Hi everyone, Faris and i started the day by making up 800ml of nutrient agar and 500ml of ringers. 2hr lunch whilst these autoclaved, 121c for 15minutes, but takes about an hour and half for the pressure to release and the temperature to drop below 80C. After lunch we poured the nutrient plates, then we made broth cultures and inubated them overnight at 37C, except B.cereus which is incubated at 30C. Then Rosie, Faris and I made agarose gels for use tomorrow. Had a great time watching Steve make up TAE buffer and making EDTA and learning how to pH it.

Hi all,
Today was a relaxing and quiet day, collected a sample of water from the Brayford and made 2 spread plates and incubated them at 30C for 2 days. Then with the help of my glamorous forensic friend Faris, we streaked a couple of nutrient agar plates, then we gram stained a further 6 plates. Roll on tomorrow x

Another fun filled day in the lab! alot quieter today, started off counting colony forming units (cfu) from Sharon richardsons Brayford water sample spread plates. photographed the spread plates and documented the results in my lab book. A habit i have had to learn, to keep my notes contemporaneous (?spelling?) Had a long lunch (2 hours) then with Rachael Simpson, completed gram staining and identifying lab cultures that were streaked at the beginning of the week. Just 3 more strains to identify on monday.