S-STEM Scholar Melanie Castaneda's Blog

  Researching Deinococcus Species  After inoculating new species and failing to see growth after multiple days, we were beginning to become frustrated since it was slowing down our project. There seemed to be a lot of waiting around to see when a species would be ready to work with while the current species we were currently testing and growing in the incubator.  This made me question if we were doing something wrong or if there was more information that we could find out about the Deinococcus genus. I decided to go on a search to learn more about Deinococcus in order for us to be more productive and prepare more for the following weeks.  Coming into this project, I was introduced to two species of the Deinococcus genus, Deinococcus radiodurans and Deinococcus aquaticus . Both of these species seemed to have a similar growth time of about 48 hours in a 30°C environment. Our newly inoculated species were placed in the same conditions, for the same amount of time, and...

  Continuing Search for D. aquaticus’s MIC This week we were determined to finish up our work with finding the MIC of D. aquaticus. We are repeating a test from the previous few weeks to help us determine the MIC. We hoped to get conclusive results by retesting D. aquaticus with Tetracycline at three different concentrations. In this trial, we added a negative control and a positive control. The negative control will only have TGY + antibiotic. The positive control will have TGY + bacteria. The purpose of a negative control is that there shouldn’t be any growth. The positive control is there to see how the bacteria should grow. If something goes wrong with these controls then the rest of the results might not be as valid.  Autoclave 8 test tubes of TGY with 0.5% agar to sterilize the mixture and the tubes 13 x 100 mm test tubes with metal caps 2.5 mL was pipetted into each tube  Remove appropriate amount of TGY  Amounts shown in table below  Add in appropriate ...