Red Eyes, Hungry, and Detached This Week

This whole week has been hectic. For instance, I always have a full day of classes on Tuesday and Thursday. The time is, basically, from 8am to 10pm at night. I, also, have classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is, in other words, an easy course for me known as Trigonometry or Trig. Now, I have to fit the internship into this heavy occupied schedule. I feel I’m doing very well on both sides, in my studies and my hands-on internship experience in the lab. I started to collect data from last week samples, and started swabbing the elevator buttons. The location of each elevator was at the Dalby Building (DB), Hannelly Center Building (HC), and B Building elevators. Both outside and inside buttons were swab. Figure 1 and 2 below are just some of the styles and shapes of the buttons.

Figure 1. The buttons inside the elevator of the Hannelly Center and awesome LED.

Figure 2. The inside buttons at the B Building elevator.

I thought this trip around the campus was entertaining because spectators about to aboard or wait for their elevator being signaled were watching cautiously about my intentions there. Some even, for example, asked “What I was swabbing for?” and “If there was a contagious microbe, they should be told about.” I simply replied, trying not to laugh, “This is for an experiment, and sorry for any inconvenience.” I bet they compared my situation to the movie Contagion.

I, also, got some mycelium fungi growing in one of my plates that weren’t incubated. In other words, one of the forms of fungi I observed was fuzzy and black, and the other form is yeast. Figure 3 and 4 below shows two plates with similar features. Earlier around noon, I took some mold from a loop and transferred it to a slide for further observation under the microscope. Although, I didn’t get a picture, I could see the hyphae filaments that made the mycelium. Furthermore, I stained a sample of a colony in figure 3, it was a pen sized red dot. The results were pink rod shaped (bacilli) which indicated that the bacteria was Gram (-); The microscopes view was set at 1000x magnification with the help of oil dropped between the objective lens of 40x and 100x. I found the exact detailed picture on Google of the results in Figure 5.

Figure 3. The second attempt swabbing of rails at another location, and here are the results. Also, there are two red like colonies growing on the plate. Lets play "I Spy."

Figure 4. The nickel sized mold was black with fuzzy like hair growing from it.

Figure 5. My staining was very similar to this photo of bacillus. I wish I could view this bacteria under a electron microscope.