Take Three.

Another week has passed! I'm getting used to my super busy schedule and once again, it's all about time-management and making a healthy balance between school, home and everything else.

In the lab, I am continuing on with my contamination experiment on door handles. The weirdest thing happened where the number of colonies actually decreased throughout the week. I'm guessing it's because the door handles were cleaned by the janitors or I had an error by collecting too much sample but at the same time, it's been the same sampling size throughout the initial week of experiment. I did some gram staining for practice, sort of like my trial week for plating and so forth. I learned something new today: the purpose of the wax on micro-slides is just for the person to know where their sample was placed. I thought it was to keep the water and sample in place and would press too hard on the micro-slides. Doing so, and drying my slides on a hot plate, the wax would displace itself from the initial circular shape and make weird "G" looking shapes and so forth. This made it difficult for me to identify the bacteria. I plan to use what I learned for future reference and hopefully my gram staining next week will be more accurate and easier to use when looking in the microscope.

Gram Staining! I love the colors.

Art-sy drying book. 

upside igloo-looking bacteria. 

Day zero are clear, once again! (I'm doing something right!)

Day two plates with bacteria in 'em.

Last but certainly not least, Josh and I decided to grow some of the colonies in TSB tubes, insert them in the incubator for 24 hours and this allows the bacteria to grow and multiply, allowing us to have plenty of bacteria for gram staining and so forth. This method would be more effective than scraping the colony itself and not having anymore left if we scrap the entire colony out. I shall check on these tomorrow morning to look for bacterial growth and once that's complete, I can do more (effective) gram staining and begin identifying the bacteria. 

Day one  TSB tubes going into the incubator for growth time!

P.S. Thanks to Jeremy for finding this ^ brand-new red rack for me (red being my favorite color!). I put my name on it to claim ownership :D THANK YOU JEREMY! I love it.

Photos of the Week:
(this is a new segment where I'll share non-internship related pictures from my week, hope you enjoy them!)

Sunrise on  Wednesday

Sunset also on Wednesday

 I love the sun/sky/stars etc.

Hope you all are having a great and productive week! Keep it going!

Greetings, Khadidja.