Week 1

This was our first day in the lab. Unfortunatly, not much progress was made. We spent much of the time finding out where basic utility items were located around the laboratory. We identified the correct equipment for melting and measuring our nutrient agar for the petri dishes, something we would do during the following days of the week.

Today we started to make some progress. We did not have access to gas for the Bunsen burner so we had to use a less efficient method to melt our agar, which took most of the hour. We did however manage to get one sample done and mix it with the Mad Dog 357 Reaper Sriracha, then put it in the fridge to end the day.

This was our first day using the Bunsen burner. We managed to melt all the agar with about thirty minutes remaining, and began measuring out the trial runs using E. coli. We initially wanted to use 10 mL of agar and 5 mL of hot sauce, but quickly realized that 5 mL of hotsauce was way too much and figured we should lower it in future tests. We did five tests, one for each sauce and a control, and put them in the incubator. We cleaned up to end the day.

Today was dedicated to streaking the E. coli onto the six different plates. Once all of the plates were streaked we put them into the incubator to grow. After the dishes were in the incubator we expieremented with different ratios of hot sauces. We noticed that the agar was not properly setting due to the large amount of hot sauce in them so we decided to reduce the amount to 1ml. This also gave us the ability to use the pipets to get a more accurate measure of the hot sauce.

Today we discovered that the agar we purchased was not the exact one we needed and ordered a different batch for the upcoming week. We finalized an initial testing method and scrapped the previous tests. We finished by deciding if we are going to order another hot sauce that is hotter than the others. We decided not do purchase this hot sauce.