3/18-3/22: Preparation of Biochemical Tests for D. Metalli

 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 in half to give to another group who were running similar tests on a different Deinococcus species. So, Monday was used to prepare all of those plates, along with the 4 starch plates, and then excess media that we needed for the SIM tests and the Urease test. On Tuesday we prepared the plates and poured the media into the plates. On Wednesday we had a starter plate streaked for D. Metalli, as it was apparently more efficient than just streaking 8+ plates from one freezebac sample. We had also streaked our control bacteria’s onto starter plates to grow, these being B. Subtilus, C. Freundii, E. Coli, and Staph. Epidermis. All of these serve as either our positive or negative controls for our different biochemical tests. On Thursday we had little growth on our D. Metalli plates but we streaked our control bacteria plates, and all of them looked to have no contamination. We were hoping to finish this project out by Monday 3/25 however that is not likely as our culture was not growing as anticipated and we could not streak our experimental plates before the weekend. At this rate, we may not be able to perform the biochemical tests until Wednesday. 


Staph. Epidermis Gram Stain 

C. Freundii Gram Stain


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