Lab Technician Wisdom

The project is currently being modified. First, the samples have increased from twenty to forty of objects containing fomites. I have increased the sampling because the error bars become extremely high in my past bar graphs of my standard deviation. My first attempt to correct error bars is as follows: I got rid of my outliers or outside values of my set of data, but half my data was eliminated or taken out from my set of data. The removal of these values caused me to have a total of 12 or less values, and the total sampling was 20. In conclusion, twelve divided by twenty will give me 60% of data and 40% of lost data. Furthermore, increasing the sampling will have less removal of outliers and more values for better averaging. Thus, the average values of my data or quantified results have been better, and also my standard deviation has better results. Figure 1 below shows how I came to this conclusion of increasing my sampling in a small range of data.

Figure 1. This is a rough sketch of my simple idea of why I increased my sampling to forty samples than twenty. The graphs show how outliers can ruin a graph. The orange bar graph is an ideally great graph, other than, the blue bar graph with horrific error bars.

I’m, also, trying to find a way to make media with hand washing antimicrobial chemicals like triclosan and chloroxylenol that are the active ingredient in antibacterial soaps. The main antimicrobial chemical is chloroxylenol by GOJO in soap dispensers in bathrooms around campus. It used to be triclosan ingredient soap dispensers but the school switched it out for reasons like not foaming when dispensed, financially expensive, or other reasons. Once the media of TSA plus antimicrobial is achieved, I will start inoculating swab samples to test whether or not microbes are resistant to soap dispenser ingredients of either triclosan or chloroxylenol. Figure 2 below shows the soap dispenser around school campuses bathrooms.

Figure 2. This gave me idea to sample the grey button in on this soap dispenser in bathrooms. The bag inside can hold up to 1250 ml of antibacterial soap, and 1700 uses of one bag.

 

This whole week I came in and realized that I had to prepare media, sterile test tubes, and other research material needed for my project.  Spraying of chemicals, like preservatives on the cadavers was performed. This would prevent saprobe microbes from feeding on them. Helping Kim set up labs was, also, done. Making TSA plates from the receipt of Jose and Josh was learned this week. I would say it was very simple, and I thought it would be a more complex lab set up. I was wrong. I was mentioning to post this picture of art on a TSA plate, but never had time. Figure 3 is the picture after of inoculation of two microbes that I haven’t identified.

Figure 3. This is made from two microbes. I would guess that the white one is S. epidermis and the orange is still unknown, and I could be wrong.