Guess who's back?..

Hello my fellow peers. I am back from a horrible week of sickness. Now that I am over that its back to the real life messing with all my bacterias. Well I think I last left off when I was beginning the new set of bacteria. To start, I looked to see what other bacteria we had in our lab that I still hadn't done. That kind of gave me a rough list of the rest that needed to be tested. This list, I must say, was a little frighting at first. It was a long list consisting of 19 bacteria all together (or 10 more than what I already have completed). I began to make a whole new stock for my use only with the remaining 10 bacteria.

My stock bacteria, which is just the concentrated bacteria grown in TSB and THI solutions.

 I also remade the previous nine that I had already done most of the tests on. I began all the test by first growing my stock on TSA plates so I can have a active bacteria when doing these reaction tests.

This is one of my plates that I grew on TSA. I choose this one just because it looked the coolest. This is what I grew all of my bacterias on and with the colonies grown on these plates I was able to run multiple test from them.

The first problem I ran into was how 5 of my TSA plates just refused to grow. That is a big problem for me because that was how I was going to do all of my tests. Not trying to throw in the towel quite so early, I then proceed to try and grow these 5 different plates in candle jars. From talking with the pro of micro (Jenn & Matt) told me this was probably the only way these bacterias were going to be able to grow on TSA. I honestly didn't think it was going to be that hard, I mean I have watched Jenn do this whole process about 50 times, how hard could it be, right?

WRONG! Ohh so wrong..

A process that seem so easy became to be one of the more difficult. Okay, maybe I am exaggerating just a bit, but it was more difficult then I had first pictured in my head. In order to do these you streak your TSA plates as normal but instead of incubating them bare you put them in these big pickle jar looking things. Once they are in there, you must add a candle that has been ignited, out on the cap and parafilm around the cap. Seems easy right? No, I would light the candle and try and drop it on top of the plates (in the jar) as carefully as I possibly could but it kept either falling to the side or turning off before I could even get to the "putting on the top" part. With frustrations beginning to over take my patience I tried again and got it.

To my disappointment, the whole candle jar only helped one of my bacterias grow. So with time running thin with this project, I decided to move on with the bacterias I did have (which was a good 6 other bacterias). Which seemed to be so much easy to do the second time around, now that I knew what I was doing, oh the joy of doing this several times before. I have gotten through with the majority of my tests and I could have completely finished last week (if I hadn't got sick) but I was able to complete the last 4 test today and will get the results by tomorrow. So do expect a follow up post to this one, soon.