A Hectic Week

This week has been a hectic week in lab. Monday we inoculated plates to grow up to be our new stock cultures, and began testing to see if the organisms grew in liquid media. Along with this plating an additional serial dilution plating was done this time with irradiated soil. The radiation would take care of organisms that would be sensitive to radiation but our target organisms are radiation tolerant and should still grow fine after their exposure. I thought that would be the exhausting part but it got even better. Wednesday we plated our isolates out repeatedly it seemed like it might never end. The organisms were plated on their respective media and put for temperature tests so that there optimal growth ranges could be deduced. If that was not enough we also inoculated plates that tested the tolerance to different levels of Sodium Chloride. This added another large number of plates to streak. This all sounds simple but to make this a little more challenging any of our isolates that grew on Marine Agar, since it already has 3% Sodium Chloride in the media, had to be changed to its next best media to keep percents same for all isolates tested. Simple switch especially since Dr. Rainey and Eugene already found what that second best media was for us, but it does throw a little wrinkle in the large simple task. I know this sounds like I am complaining about the size of the experiment, but it’s nothing I have not dealt with before the Post Doctorate that I was working under always use to plan these huge plating days with four to five hundred plates so it retrospect this was a breeze.