S-STEM Scholar Marisa Ostos Blog

This week, since we only have one week left of school until the semester ends, we are in the wrap up phase to where we have discovered that we can do one more transformation run. This will be our last chance of the year to see if we can attempt transformation without contaminating any of our items, as this seems to me the most prominent issue that we have had throughout the semester. Now, what was interesting was that we decided to do gram stains of all of the bacteria that we used for a transformation that was immediately taken out of the shaking incubator on day two of transformation, right before we plated them. We actually thought that we would find contamination in at least one of these tubes, but alas, every single one of them was a perfect gramstain of just the bacteria we needed. Because of this, and because the gram stains of all of our competent cells from freeze back where sterile, we could only then conclude that contamination occurred on transformat...

Although this week resulted in some not-so-exciting news, we may have made some progression in our research. We ran another transformation on Deinococcus radiodurans, as per usual, and this time after allowing our plates to sit over the weekend in the incubator, our +Cm plates had actual growth on them, with colonies that were of the same shape and color as radiodurans should be when looking head-on at the plates. This alone was quite exciting because out of all the transformations we have run so far, this was the first time we saw this type of growth on our plates (at least growth that wasn't deep red and indicated Serratia!).  It was quite exciting initially because it looked like we could have possibly actually done it this time! Alas, our gram stains unfortunately told us otherwise. Now, what was interesting was that we had actually done a Gram stain after plating our competent cells to make sure that the cells were viable and that they were ...