S-STEM Scholar Kalen Mullenix's Blog

 On Monday we started by Gram Staining our starter plate for D. Metalli, the species was observed to be Gram positive and rod shaped, our Gram Staining was consistent with these observations as we had a Gram positive, rod shaped, bacteria. After we had Gram stained we then proceeded to streak all of our experimental plates. These plates included R2A and TGY plates for the catalase and oxidase tests, then we had streaked the Starch TGY plate for the Starch hydrolysis tests, and finally for the D. Metalli plates we streaked 2 experimental Urease plates, as well as inoculated the SIM Test tubes, which we had 2 experimental tubes. Then we had streaked our control plates/tubes with our control bacteria. These bacteria consisted of B. Subtilus, S. Epidermis, E. Coli, and C. Fruendii. Then, once all of our experimental plates/tubes and our control plates/tubes were inoculated we had put the inoculated media into the incubator for the bacteria to grow. For our experimental plates/tubes we ...

 As the Gibson Assembly project was giving some discouraging results and it felt as though we had hit a wall, we had pivoted to a different project. For this project we wanted to run several tests on D. Metalli since it is a relatively not-well-known species. The point of these tests are to characterize this specific strain of the Deinococcus species. The tests that we plan on running on this species include: oxidase, catalase, SIM, Starch, and Urease. Each of these tests look for specific things that can help with characterizing D. Metalli, such as the starch test is used for testing if the species can metabolize starch. To start this we prepared 625 mL of R2A Agar for a total of ~24 plates and then ~500 mL of TGY Agar for around 20 plates. The purpose of this is to grow the bacteria on two different media’s and look at the differences. Such as if different medias affect growth time or cell morphology. Granted, not all of those plates were specifically for us, we split the plats i...