Brand new yogurts yea!!!

Hello all, I hope everyone had a wonderful relaxing spring break. I know the last time I blogged before spring break I said I had a game plan which I did. However once I got into the lab on Monday I was stopped in my tracks due to all my yogurts and dairy products being out of date (expired). I had to make a shopping list of all eleven dairy products for Matt. It took a few days but Matt came through with a whole bunch of yogurts and dairy products. To be precise he came through with eighteen yogurts/dairy products; the refrigerator is full to the max. I have to wait until next week to dive into all these new products I cannot wait to start. With that many products I will be dividing them up into five groups; below are pictures of the groups I have divided them up in.

Time to take a break and recharge

I don’t know about all of you but I am very glad that next week is spring break. I plan on spending my getting caught up/head on homework, getting caught up on house hold chores I have been putting off and taking the time to really relax so I can come back recharge ready to hit the ground running. Since next week I won’t be in the lab I took time this week to wrap up what I was working on which was trying to get a count of growth from the yogurts I am working with. Out of the eleven products of yogurt I’m working with I only successfully got four of the products to where I can actually count the number of growth. Everything else has come back either blank, contaminated, or too numerous to count. I cleaned out the incubator of all my trails and error plate and made more TSA media so when I come back I can jump right into what I need to do. I also came up with a list of what I have to work on still and with any luck I can get most of that list finish the week we come back from spring break. Well I hope you all have a great and safe spring break see you all when we get back.

Image from wordfromthewell.com

Writing Time

So this week has been spent playing catch up in both my classes and in the bioscience lab. I don’t have much to report this week aside from working on my abstract for the student conference at Estrella Mountain; I redid four of the yogurts because when I did them in the first place I mixed up the amount of yogurt that was supposed to go into the solution. With getting over being sick I didn’t make it to the field trip last Friday to the World Wildlife Zoo. I was really bummed I couldn’t make it but I was right in my decision to stay home and rest up. I look forward to seeing everyone’s blog that got to go and took pictures. Have a good weekend all!!!

This image was taken from grammar.about.com

Sour throat, runny nose, and cough oh my........

Howdy all, well today is my first day back in the lab this week. I was unable to come in because I caught a cold bug over this past weekend. I woke-up Saturday morning with a sore throat and a mild cough, by Sunday morning I could add a runny nose to the list of symptoms I had. I knew I had to take some time to rest when I couldn’t stay asleep Sunday night because I kept on coughing. Waking-up Monday was the worst; Tuesday was a little better but I decided I better not chance it and go to school. I am feeling better than I did this past weekend but I still have a cough that is still lingering. Upon arriving in the lab today I found out that I made a mistake while diluting some of the yogurts last week. I changed the peptone water to 90mL from 99mL with making this changes I over looked changing the yogurt amount from 1mL to 10mL (99mL of peptone water with 1mL of yogurt and 90mL of peptone water with 10mL of yogurt). This is something I’ll be mixing next week. Since I only made it in one day this week I wasn’t able to make another batch of TSA media, so I don’t have any pictures to post. However, I did take a picture of the already finished TSA plates I did last week (posted blow).

A week of studying and trying something new.

Howdy all!! Who else is ready for the three day weekend coming up? I know I am, this week has been packed with studying for tests in both BIO 182 and CHM130. I also finished up diluting the rest of the yogurt products I had not gotten to last week. The pretty cool thing I did this week in lab was learned how to make TSA plates. I was using so much in my project with the yogurt Josh had me make my only plates. I totally forgot to take pictures when I was doing it, however I am going to be make another batch of plates come this Tuesday so I will make sure to take plenty of pictures. Have a great weekend everyone.

The above picture is from amazon.com

Moving Forward

Hello everyone, hope you all had a great week so far. Well as my title states, I moved forward in my project to diluting the yogurt before putting it on a TSA plate. With eleven products to dilute and plate I decided to split the products into three group; two groups of four and one group of three. I diluted and plated the first group of four products on Tuesday the 4th and the second group of three products on Wednesday the 5th. Out of the first group, only one plate had growth on it (I am looking for Lactobacillus or Streptococcus) the other three had nothing. From the second group the same thing happened only one plate had growth and the other two had nothing. The two plates that had growth were the Fry’s buttermilk and the Mountain High plain regular yogurt. However, the two plates had too much growth to count so I will be re-doing them next week with a lower amount on the plates. As for the plates that had nothing I will also re-doing them but this time I will be changing the dilution to a lower solution. Next week will be a busy week full of re-dos and finishing diluting and plating the products I did not get to this week.

The two top pictures are of all the equipment I used to dilute and plate. The bottom two pictures are of the plates that had growth. Second to last picture is the Fry's buttermilk and the last picture is the Mountain High plain regular yogurt.

NEW SEMESTER, NEW PROJECT.

Welcome back everyone and a big welcome to all the new S-STEM scholars. I am happy to be back and ready to make this semester a great one. This pass Monday the 27th was my first day back in the bioscience lab and there was a change made to my project for this semester. Instead of fomites being my project I’ll be doing a project on probiotics. The new project seems like it going to be fun to do; I’ll be working with different types of yogurts/dairy products. When I came in on Monday Matt had already gone to the store and picked up eleven different types of products to be tested. Matt gave me a good starting point to start at; he hinted at looking up how to detect concentration levels in yogurts and dairy products. After looking up what I needed I decided that I would start with streaking a TSA plate for each eleven products to see if I can grow any bacteria, I did that on Tuesday. When checked today some of the TSA plates did have some growth on them. However, after talking to Matt he said that I started at a good test but what would work even better is if the products were diluted before putting them on the TSA plates. So that is what I’ll be doing next week.

Above are two pictures out of the eleven TSA plates streaked.