Overloaded Work

A few days ago, I took out my door handle cultures, and I compared them and quantified the colonies growing. Figure 1 and 2 is the external door handles, and figure 3 and 4 is the internal handles of the 2^nd floor classrooms of the DB building. I’m waiting and planning to gram stain them soon. One of the lab sith lords are pushing me to stain. I won’t say whom. I'm looking forward to it but never have time.

Figure 1. Shows the TSA plates being incubated for 3 days; it was supposed to be for 24 hours.

Figure 2. Shows only six because I swab a public door, so it was excluded from my data for being a public door.

Figure 3. The before shot of potential microbes.

Figure 4. The plate number 14 is excluded because of same reason above, and I just wanted to show the ones that did have something. Number 4 has like a splash of growing cultures instead of circular.

Next week in microbiology is gram staining, microscopy, and smear preparation; my purpose for gram staining is identifying the cell wall of present bacteria growing in my plates. The internship is really giving me some pre-knowledge of the future labs. For instance, the pre-labs are, also, going over the microscopic imaging of the shapes and sizes, and the anaerobic and non-anaerobic that prokaryotic cells need. This will lead to a key of some sort, a bible for identifying bacteria, fungi, and other microbes.

I started a small project and took samples of my mouth, hat, and forehead. How much microorganisms are present in my mouth, hat, and forehead? The results were awesome. The TSA plates lit up with orange dots everywhere. Figure 5-6 show the results of a before and after shot. The mouth swab culture looks like smeared mustard, and the forehead swabbing looks like sprinkled yellow salt grains. Lastly, the hast swab looks like the above sample of the classroom door handles.

Figure 5. Before entering the incubator for 3 days.

Figure 6. Looks like yellow mustard. Can't wait to gram stain this one.

Today, the second target being swabbed is rails. Figure 7-8 shows the type/style and location around the stairwell area. Arbitrary swabbing was made around the DB building of both the south and north stairwells. I, also, registered for the 11^th Annual Student Research Conference; I’m kind of nervous about how I have to present a poster to professional educators. For instance, a vivid picture is standing there with your poster, and many high ranked people poking at me with their questions. Gilbert gave some insight on how their will be people like that. I don’t really like to talk, but it is a weakness I can build on. I look forward to it if accepted to their conference. A new experience will just broaden my skills in speaking to the public. Moreover, I will just have to know what I’m talking about.

Figure 7. There is too much rails to grab when walking up and down stairs.

Figure 8. There was some nasty black stuff on the bottom of each rail. Everyone's fingers are touching it.