Linda again

Last week, I found out that my BSA versus BSA+mucin procedure was successful; according to the nifty plate well cell reader device, the BSA+mucin biofilm samples had 0.084, 0.111, 0.251, and 0.100 concentrations of bacteria while the BSA had all lower ones: 0.023, 0.042, 0.047, and 0.037. However the 0.251 reading was a bit extraneous, and I'm attributing it to the micro pipette-bubble accident that probably contaminated that particular cell. Whoops. Afterwards, I uploaded my data onto Prism, where it fashioned really spectacular graphs and analyzed my data so thoroughly and speedily that I felt rather old.

This week, I began doing some preliminary data-collection relating to my project. The mission? To gather 0 weeks data for colony diameter in AF317, MG1655, and Fufu bacteria from 5 different mouse cecums, as diameter directly correlates with rate of growth. I must say that when I started, I thought it would be simple enough: just smear some bacteria onto a plate and twiddle your thumbs for an hour or two until they finished growing. Not so. Add in several hours of prep plus thawing, vortexing, incubating, labelling, massing, extracting Fufu from cecum sacs with a two-inch pipette tip, sterilizing, autoclaving, remassing, calculating and adjusting concentrations, more vortexing, diluting, spreading, and clean-up. The most amazingly tedious aspect was the diluting, as 8 dilutions were necessary for each of the 7 bacteria and each time a new micro pipette tip was needed as well as vortexing. By the end of the diluting process, around 3 hours, I think I became a little nonchalant in the dilutions...which I think led to the fact that there grew a mysterious new strain of bacteria in one of bacteria plates. Thankfully, the rest seemed entirely normal and proliferating and usable, but from now on, I resolve to keep my wits about me and take a quick break if I start to get feckless instead of risking sabotaging all my hard work. This reminds me of a hilarious yet slightly embarrassing little episode that happened that day. It was around noon and I was busy pipetting my way along, when my PI Bill comes up and asks me how long I'll be. I tell him I still have a few left to do, so maybe 30 minutes or so. Then he says "why don't you take a break from working on that?", and then proceeds to talk to the others congregated in our little lab hall. So I plop off my chair and go to lunch. An hour later, Mary Lou, my mentor, goes "There you are! We've been looking for you!" Apparently Bill had wanted me to take a break from pipetting so he could show me how to scan and photoshop plates. Everyone had stood around hypothesizing that I had an overactive bladder and was hanging around in the bathroom, until they realized that I could not possibly be in it for that long of a time. Now whenever someone speaks to me, I make sure to paraphrase exactly what they say back...in case of a misunderstanding.