Please Excuse My Absence

I had been sampling and counting plates, since I came in for the first week of this month, but it came to a halt last week when I missed the whole week. It was like a daily routine before my absences in the lab. A tedious workload that has its benefits is considered the duty of student interns.

  I, furthermore, notice that one of my flaws in the Bio department (dept.) is pouring plates for TSA media. For instance, Josh, Jose, and I poured plates and took one solidified plate from each batch that each person had made and let it sit above the window niche. The next days showed that I had colonies of growth, and Jose was second for growth. I believe that my plate had growth in only one day, and Jose was about 2-3 days of growth. Matt asked, “If I was talking or taking breaks from pouring?” and this gave the idea that I should start pouring in the filtered hood. In other words, I lack the skill of pouring media. The video below shows how to simply pour media in the lab, but I don’t believe we drop antibiotics or x-gal into the hot liquid.

 

The most exciting target for those weeks was soap dispenser buttons in the bathrooms. Also, the desk that student sit at during lecture was sampled. I walked around the campus of the English dept., math dept., and chemistry dept. for sampling. I would have to admit I saw a few instructors from the bio dept. all over campus like Rosati and other instructors who know of my project. I’m, basically, pushing a cart around with a miniature orange biohazard trash container, sterile swabs, and test tubes. I still get stares like in the elevators and other places where I’m swabbing, but I ensure that I’m pursuing a project or experiment.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t accepted to the Estrella Mountain Conference in May. The second week of this month was a total failure for my internship because I was absent throughout the week. I did, however, attended my scheduled classes to keep up with my grades. I have updated my graph of my project and it looks like the soap dispensers were, also, high in average colony counts.

Figure 1. The graph needs to have more bars of objects, and it will look more professional. Hopefully, I will have more places to sample.

 I read from an online source that this more traditional dispenser is preferred because of its easy foaming germ-killing power. It, also, dispenses 1,700 times. Thus, it can serve a range from 300-850 people depending on the number of dispensing during hand washing techniques. This is a huge area of transferring microbes because you would think that the soap from hand contact and water would lower the count in that area. My educated guess is that dirty hands with either resident flora or transient flora make contact with the button, and no further cleaning techniques are pursued on the buttons around campus. Thus, the accumulation of microbes occur with more transfers.