S-STEM Scholar Marisa Ostos Blog

This week's focus was on preparing for getting what I can done within the next 4 weeks before it is time to wrap up the semester for the holiday break. One thing I did implement was creating a more streamlined process of keeping track of our inventory so that we can always know how much of what material (and of what bacteria) we have in stock at all times. Because of this, I created quite a bit of broth, both with and without agar, so we can have what we need for the next few weeks. The following was created:  - 200 mL of LB broth (will be used for any kind of inoculation of E. coli)  - 200 mL of TGY 3:3:1 broth (will be used for any kind of inoculation of Deinococcus radiodurans or Deinococcus aquatics)  - 200 mL of LB broth with agar (will have ampicillin added to it when creating plates and will be used to inoculate any of our E coli that have plasmids with the Ampicillin-resistant gene)  - 75 mL of LB broth with agar (will be used to inoculate regular E coli onto...

This week turned out to be a rather short week as one of the two full days that I could be at lab was unavailable due to Veteran's Day. Because of this, and because we do need Fridays to do part two of transformation (plating needs to occur after 16 hours of finishing part one of transformation), transformation does need to be moved to next week. However, rather than needing to wait until Thursday (as this is the only day during the week that works with my schedule that allows for the 16-hour time-lapse needed for transformation to occur), a lab mate will be able to jump in and help on Tuesday so that we can ideally see transformation happen potentially as early as Wednesday! In the meantime, this week focused on  preparing for an increase in the team size long for I need to find more efficient processes within the lab, especially as there are more people who will be working with the materials in the lab. I realized that we needed a better way to keep track of inventory in a way wh...

I made an interesting discovery this week which actually involved a process that I should have suspected but didn't think was happening at the time. Last week, when I did my Gram stain on my bacteria, I thought that because I saw pinky coli in the microscope after having done the gram stain, with regions of purple, that I had just done the Gram stain and correctly as otherwise the second and third slides came out just fine. However, my lab mate, when doing a Gram stain a second and a third time, ended up seeing something entirely different:  Alas, it was none other than contamination itself. Now, what was nice was that when he did his gram stain on one of the other tubes, we did have e coli, albeit some regions that were purple:  But because of this, a plasmic extraction was done either way, as he also thought that he just didn't do a Gram stain correctly on the other slide because it was otherwise the shape of e coli and there were regions that were pi...