For this experiment I wanted to see the difference in bacteria growth on parts of the body versus things we keep close to us. I tried to take samples from different places where people already questioned bacteria growth and see what would grow! For the different parts of my body, I tried the lining of my lip and around one of my earrings. The back of my phone and the rim on the inside of my glasses were used for the other two samples. This was duplicated as closely as possible for samples on two different petri dishes so that we could test growth in both room temperature and in 37 degrees Celsius.
When the plates were examined on day two, there seemed to be little to no growth. Although I thought there would be a lot from the different samples I took, it seemed not much happened in two days. A few bubbles had slightly appeared on the body temperature plate (37 degrees Celsius), but nothing at all on the room temperature plate. Maybe after a week!
Finally some growth!...Well, sort of. On the room temperature plate, still nothing seemed to really grow. But as we can see there was plenty of growth on the plate incubated at body temperature, rightfully so I guess. Surprisingly, the back of the phone had the least amount of colonies when I counted about 6. These colonies were the only ones that were slightly different, they had a slightly more brown-ish color to them and had a larger diameter than most of the other colonies. The rest of the colonies were fairly small with a raw egg kind of look to them. They looked slimy ( I didn't care to test that part out) with some being off white, while others were fairly yellow. The glasses rim had about 30 colonies, with the inside of my lip following having closer to about 50 colonies. As you can tell by the pictures, around the piercing had too many colonies to count. Time to go clean behind the ears?
As you can see, it wasn't the easiest getting the picture of the samples. For most of my samples, the just turned out to look like a smear under the microscope. No matter how thin I tried to get the sample, it just looked a dirty lens. But maybe that was for the better, Ignorance is bliss?
After looking at Gwen's blog and looking at the articles, it would make sense that it is some sort of Staphylococcus sp. It is something common that we all common in contact with every so often. We most likely have some sort of strain of this bacteria around our bodies that stays dormant until something like someone sneezing around us to make us sick. But in the end my prediction seemed to be accepted. There was definitely more colonies on the samples from my body, then on everyday things that we use, although I didn't expect the bacteria to be surprisingly similar.
Hi Karissa, I also took glasses rims as my specimen. It only had 5 to 6 colonies just like yours. I believe our glasses rims are quite clean huh? Compare to your results, yours is more diverse than me. My results only had one different color colonies, and you had a lot. The thing most surprised me the amount behind our ears, I can't believe that could be that much. About your slide, I believe that you didn't focus enough. The picture of your slide only represented for the water bubbles. I had problems in finding bacteria on slides as well. In general, I very enjoyed reading your blog post because I can find someone can compare the result from glasses rims with me.
ReplyDelete