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Thursday, November 29, 2018

Week 2


Week 12:
I came back this week feeling refreshed from thanksgiving break! I continued to identify my bacteria. To identify the bacteria, I had to transfer over a colony of bacteria from TSA plate with a Loop onto a clean glass slide. After transferring over bacteria onto the glass slide, I proceeded with gram staining. If I am being honest, I think it is the worst gram stain I’ve ever seen haha. Anyhow, after doing the gram staining, I took the best slide and looked at it under the microscope. I set my lens at 4x objective, then a 10x and 100x to take a closer look at the organism. The cell color came out to be pink! I concluded that the bacteria I looked at was bacilli gram stain negative. I did 3 tests on the gram-negative bacilli. I inoculated with a Loop/Needle the bacteria into Glucose, Gel, and SIM tubes and stored it in the incubator overnight. Today I looked at the results of the tubes and the Glucose Test came back Gas Positive. The Gel came back Positive, turning from a solid to a liquid. The SIM test were not so reliable as the inoculation was bad. I went based off the color change near the start of bacteria growth which was not black. I Identified my unknown bacteria as Serratia Marcescens!

-        Francisco





2 comments:

  1. Hello Francisco! What a great welcome, huh? You get to identify a microbe. If you love microbes as much as I do I am pretty sure you are having fun using all the different testing procedures to figure out the microbe you have. I am jealous you were able to identify Serratia marcescens. Recently, at a hospital it was identified nosocomial event. Looking back, I remember seeing indications of it at a local YMCA I used to go to. SO cool!

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  2. Hi Francisco! I'm glad you were able to identify your unknown. It is pretty tedious work having to go through all those tests just to identify it, but in the end I hope it was interesting for you! When I had to identify mine I was really confused because I have not taken Micro yet, but since my project last semester dealt with identifying bacteria, I got a lot of practice finding unknowns!

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