S-STEM Scholar Melanie Castaneda's Blog

  Introduction  This week we will be performing the biochemical tests that we planned last week. These tests will help us characterize Deinococcus metalli and see how similar or different it is from other species in the genus.  Methods  3/25/2024 Before starting any tests, we did a gram stain of D. metalli to make sure that there was no contamination. Once we were done, we began streaking all of our plates that we will be using for our experiments. In total, we streaked about 22 plates. Every plate was streaked using a four-way streak except for the two plates we would be using for the starch test. Those were not done in a specific pattern. We also inoculated 8 agar tubes for the SIM tests. 3/26/2024 While we wait for our bacteria to grow, we spent time working on our abstract for the poster. This was the first time that my groupmates and I ever wrote an abstract so we began by watching a video made by the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science and also researching D. met...

  Introduction With upcoming science conferences, we were given the opportunity to start another short project in hopes of getting it done in time to submit an abstract for the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science annual conference. We put our current project on hold for the time being and began working on a project to help us characterize another species of bacteria in the Deinococcus genome. Through a series of biochemical tests, we will test Deinococcus metalli to determine its motility, its type of respiration, what enzyme it produces/breaks down, etc.  Very little information is known about D. metalli and we are curious to know if it also  has some of the same characteristics as other Deinococcus species. The Deinococcus genome is known for its resilience when it comes to heat and UV radiation. In order to do this, we will perform the Oxidase, Urease, Catalase, Starch Hydrolysis, SIM, and Citrate tests.   Methods  3/18/24  We started the week...