Thursday, October 16, 2014

Making Media

Top picture is of L. S. Differential medium base & the bottom picture is of the antibiotic-free skim milk.

Yes after waiting and doing some more waiting I actually got to physically start my project this week in lab. All my supplies finally came in to make the L. S. Differential media I’ll be using in my project. On Monday I talked to Cori about how long it would take from start to finish. She told me that it would take about three and half hours. It was a no go on Monday for making the media because I wouldn’t have enough time to finish.

On Wednesday I came into the lab and made the media. I’m not going to lie it took me more than three and half hours to make the media. However, it was a great learning experience. I ran into a few problems making the media but nothing I couldn’t overcome with the help of Cori. The first problem that came up had to do with adjusting the timer on the autoclave machine. The L. S. Differential media requires antibiotic-free skim milk to be added into the main media along with TTC (Triphenyl-Tetrazolium Chloride). In preparation the antibiotic-free skim milk had to be autoclave for five minutes and the setting on the autoclave are set at fifteen minutes. When we asked Josh about how to go about changing the settings he brought up another way to prepare the skim milk instead of changing the settings. That way was to use the microwave to heat up the milk and then filter it through a filter pump. This way did not work at all and caused most of the problems that I ran into. From the microwave over cooking the milk to the filter getting clogged do to the fat cells inside the milk. In the end Cori found a way to readjust the settings using the liquid settings on the autoclave machine and I ended up autoclaving the antibiotic-free skim milk.

No comments:

Post a Comment