Week 7

Today we realized we were in a lot of trouble. Our gram stain for Friday's tests came back with severe mold and bacterial infestation that should not be there. We spent the day analyzing these factors and deciding what the best course of action was. We concluded on conducting various tests on each factor that goes into making our plates (water, hot sauce, beakers etc) for Tuesday.

After the realization from monday we decided to conduct tests on the various factors of our tests. We made a sperate plate for each of the factors and then streaked them with the appropriate materials(hot sauce, inside of a beaker, the water, and E. coli). We then put them in the incubator to grow.

Today we analyzed our results from Tuesday. We decided that the only plate with visible growth (apart from the E. coli) was the beaker plate, which had several large white spots. We gram stained the E. coli plate and found no visible evidence of any contamination to our supply of E. coli. We have decided to change our methodology for cleaning the beakers and we will test the homemade agar tomorrow. 

Today we put our new methods of cleaning the beakers to the test. We left out beakers in the UV light machine but put it closer to the light. We were testing two different methods of cleaning the beakers. The first scrubing it using a sponge soap and water, and one with clorox spray. Both beakers were put under UV light for 35 minutes. We then made three agar plates and swabbed the inside of both onto the different plates. We also left a control plate with nothing on it to see if our agar was infected.

Once we got back in the lab today we pulled our plates out of the incubator and anaylized them. We soon realized that the only plate with bacteria growth was the one that we scrubbed with sponge and soap. This led us to believe that this was the reason of the bacter on the previous plates. We also gram stained the bacteria from the plate and matched up with the bacteria from the hot sauce plate. However the method that did work was the one that we used Clorox, so we will be usinf this method going foward.