Life (and BIOL 4126) went on as usual........but not for everyone...

Yes it was Mardi Gras this past week and here in LA the students get M, T and W off school and there are no classes. This situation is yet another example of the lack of separation of church and state (how many religious holidays does the state of LA close down for?). But the three days of Carnival are not all fun and beads and by the end of Fat Tuesday 12 people had received gun shoot wounds in the Crescent City and at least two of these incidents ended in the loss of life. As Chris Rose wrote in the Living Section (of TP) no one really cares. It is just what we expect or maybe it’s just what we accept! There are no protests outside city hall, no one is calling for the police chief to hang up his white shirt or the mayor to hand in his credit card. Most people probably didn’t even notice or hear about it and as they woke up Wednesday morning searching for the hangover cure the last thing on their mind was the dead and the maimed (or BIOL 4126).

For some Wednesday was just another day, things to do, places to go and plates to streak! In fact Monday was the day the pH 4.0 plates got prepared. Then on Wednesday the 10C plates got restreaked and incubated in an incubator that works and stays at 10C (a better quality one this time unlike the last piece of junk we tried last time). Restreaks were also prepared for the other temperature tests that had been problematic first time round. For the strains that showed growth in the first experiment it was a case of upwards and onwards as they got restreaked and incubated at 45 and 50C. In the papers that we are all reading in our attempt to ace the midterm many of the strains had been tested for the degradation of various polymers. So in an attempt to test our strains for these phenotypes plates containing Avicel (crystalline cellulose) , granular cellulose and xylan had all 78 strains streaked on them.

During this streaking of plates by it was noticed that some of our fellow class mates have failed to master the steak plate technique. Many of the 25C stock plates had little or no growth on them due to bad streak plate technique. Dr. Rainey said he will have to give a demo next class which is sad considering many in class are graduating seniors or microbiology majors.

So on Wednesday in the RaineyLab there were no evident or confessed hangovers (oh dear – now who is not separating church and state)and for us life and BIOL 4126 went on as usual. But maybe we should take a minute to think of those whose lives got changed forever and did not go on as usual or worse still those who’s lives had ended the previous day when Tuesday was not so ‘Phat’ after all……