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!
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Francisco
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!
ReplyDeleteHi 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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