Hand Washing Phenomena: Colony Isolation

09/03/13
        Background Story: Dr. P, the first day of class, handed over petri dishes and told us to stick our uncleaned thumb onto it, then, wash our hands and touch it in a different place to observe how good we were at washing our hands. What trickery was this? Of course our befores were going to be dirtier than our afters! Psych! Once we did this the petri dish was put in the incubator and after 48 hours of incubating this was the terrifying result:

Conclusion: there is something in the water or on the paper towels, because we were all dirtier after having washed out hands.

        We then used this to learn how to isolate colonies of bacteria via streak plate technique. Once the technique was preformed we put the new petri dish back in the room temperature incubator to await our isolated (hopefully!) colonies.

09/05/13
       Did the streak plate technique do its job? Were we successful in our endeavor? Look and see:

YEA! We successfully isolated a colony, and plus, it was pretty! Didn't smell so great, though!
Next line of business: learning to stain the isolated bacteria. We used the pink colony.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we decided to show you up close and PERSONAL!

Don't forget to sterilize that inoculating loop! :)

                                             Taking a sample of the bacteria for the slide

We smeared the bacteria from the loop onto the water on this slide. We let the slide air dry. Then we quickly ran it through a low heat flame to ensure that the bacteria were fixed on the slide.

                                           Next step dying:

                                         Then washing:

Blotting off excess water...

Now we get to look at it through the microscope to see if we did it correctly ;) WHOOPEEE!

This is what we saw at first... and then our instructor so kindly reminded us that the point of an OIL EMERSION lens (which happened to be the lens we were looking through)  is to actually use OIL! Who would have thunk? Whoops.... So after being enlightened this was the much clearer result... as our instructor said its like a person with cataracts vs. a person with 20/20 vision. He was right!

If you look closely, you can see bacteria filled with spores... oh the power of the oil emersion lens! YAH, Spores ..... gross!

Conclusion: We definitely learned a lot and were grossed out in the process. All you Bio majors out there, know why we got freaked out by spores. :) Anywho, we learned how to better our microbiology experience by proper use of lab tools.... and to where gloves EVERYWHERE from now on. And masks. *<:-)

Until Next Time Then,
JTA and ART