The good thing is, we've moved forward onto testing the second set of plastics. Last month, 5 pieces of each type of the six plastics were obtained and placed on agar plates. This week's first objective was to observe and describe the bacterial colonies that were growing on those plates. The morphological characteristics we looked for were form, elevation and margin. This may help us better identify the bacteria growing on the plastics.
The second objective we were able to get started on, is gram staining. This would be our second round of gram staining. (We're probably going to be experts after all this.)
Lastly, I wanted to mention that one of my team members sampled the canal water, to gain an understanding of what may be floating in that environment. Growth was found in both, a TSA plate and a PIA plate. I'm hoping we can find out more in the upcoming weeks.
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| PIA plate with visible bacterial growth from sampled canal water. |
Hi Meli! My name is Mason Manning, and I am a current S-STEM Scholar at ASU, which is how I came to be reading your blog. Have you found any cool results with your project so far? Anything alarming or exciting? And, actually, I thought this week went by too quickly!
ReplyDeleteI feel every week goes slow except when I need to do work in the lab ha ha. What morphological characteristics did you find so far? Even though gram staining is so tedious, it is very therapeutic. I hope that your project goes well, especially since you have the canal water to see exactly that grows there.
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