The second week of class….

This week class only met on Wednesday as Monday was a holiday for MLK birthday celebrations.

At the beginning of class we had a discussion on the strains we are studying and what we were going to do in lab today. Dr. Rainey asked that we write a blog this week about the colony characteristics of one of the three genera we are studying and based on what we see in our strain photographs choose a strain that we think belongs to that genus.

This week we checked our strains that we had streaked the previous Monday for growth, color (at 9 days incubation) and contamination. These data were recorded in the strain datasheet that we emailed to Dr. Rainey.

Dr. Rainey provided each group with a soil sample. These soil samples came from desert soils in Nevada, Mojave and Gobi deserts. We used these soil samples for serial dilution plating on the agar plates that we prepared in last class. We made serial dilutions with 1g of soil in 9ml of liquid media (1/10 PCA) and plated this on MA, 1/10 PCA, 1/100 PCA and PCA agar. After spreading the plates we incubated them at 25C. The aim of this is to attempt to isolate strains of the genera Geodermatophilus, Blastococcus and Modestobacter from these soil samples. After incubation we will select colonies that resemble species of these genera and determine their identity using molecular approaches.