S-STEM Scholar Rebecca Matadamas's Blog

During this lab weekend, my lab partner, Baylee, and I began planning out our biofilm experiment with Chad, one of the peer mentors in this STEM lab. After researching much about biofilm and effects that can vary the growth or reduction of biofilm, my lab partner and I decided testing the effect of salt concentration on biofilm would gather information that may not already be out there. For this experiment, we will be using D. Gobi, and testing salts MgCl ₂,  MnCl ₂ , and NaCl.

On 9/14 Lab, I attempted gram staining D. Rad and it was unsuccessful. Today, I attempted to improve my gram staining skills through gram staining P. Fluorescens and it was successful. The P. Fluorescens had biofilm growing in it, but unfortunately due to the nature of the technique (inoculation loops vs. pipetting), there was no biofilm in the sample, so in the pictures, there is no visible biofilm. 

On 9/1 lab, I gram stained from plates for the second time. These samples were unknown, so to ensure accuracy, another lab partner helped with the inoculating and staining. I redid my slides and stains twice, because my first round was very much user-error. First, I was waiting for the sample to dry on the slide, and went to heat fix it too soon, so some of the water, I'm assuming with some of the sample in it, slide out of the wax circle I had drawn. I then heat fixed a different sample, after waiting longer for them to dry, and I held it over the flame for too long, resulting in a piece of the slide breaking off. I was still able to gram stain it, but the sample was grey/black under the microscope. After redoing the slides and gram stains, there was a bit of color in my samples. Unfortunately, there was not much, but this is the most colorful out of all of my samples.