Summary of the first week of class….

So what did we do in the first week of class? We got off to a flying start – no waiting for the second week to get started - straight into lab work on the first day.
Dr Rainey had prepared some 78 cultures from his collection for us to work with and had streaked them out on 4 different agar media before the winter break. He also set up an Airset.com page with all of the class materials (syllabus, datasheet, publications, links to websites we will need to use) available in the one location.

On first day we had a general introduction and went over the syllabus. There will be midterm and final exams as well as group presentations, a scientific paper, lab note book and a blog to write each week for which various points will be awarded. After that we went to the lab and divided up into 3 groups of 3 students. Each group was assigned 26 strains to study during the semester. On the first day we recorded the characteristics of the colonies on the plates – there are some very interesting colored organisms in the collection (black, pink, and orange – see pictures below). Each group included this data into a datasheet that was already set up on the AirSet.com page and emailed it to Dr Rainey who later combined the data of the 3 groups and uploaded an updated data sheet that we can view.

We then transferred the strains to a new plate of the medium on which they had grown best. A couple of strains seemed to have more than one colony type of looked contamined so we attempted to purify these. We used the digital camera to take a close up picture of each strain that will be included in our database that we will develop this semester. Dr Rainey processed the pictures and put them up on the AirSet.com page so as we can access and view them during the semester.

The second day of class involved preparing agar, microwaving it to dissolve it and autoclaving it to sterilize it. These agar plates will be used next week on Wednesday (Monday is a holiday) for the isolation of bacteria from soil samples. We will attempt to isolate organisms from soils from deserts that are similar to those in the strain collection we are working with. We will do this by diluting the soils samples and spreading them on the agar plates. After incubation we will select colonies that based on morphology belong to the Geodematophilus/Blastococcus/Modestobacter group.

We then had a lecture/discussion in which Dr Rainey demonstrated the current content of the Airset.com page and went through the outline of the project we will carry out this semester. He then went through a number of the papers that describe organisms related to the ones we will be working with and pointed out how the information in the papers will be used to design experiments and make comparisons.

After the lecture we had the chance to pour the agar that was cooled into Petri plates. Each half bottle of agar was enough to make 20 plates.

So the first week turned out well and I look forward to the future classes.