Day 1: TSA Plates Set-up
Figure 1
Figure 2
On the first day, I divided the TSA plates into two sections, one was the sample from my mouth, and the other section was the sample from my phone. I labeled them and placed them under different temperatures, one at 24 degrees and one at 37 degrees. In figure 2, the TSA plate on the left was going to place at room temperature, which was 24 degrees; the TSA plate on the right was going to place at the similar temperature as human body, which was 37 degrees.
Day 3: First Observation
Figure 3
Figure 4
After about three days, I saw some of the colonies showed up. According to figure 3, the left plate was the one at 37 degrees, the right plate was the one at 24 degrees. As we can see, plenty of colonies emerged in both plates, which were the sample came from my mouth. Those colonies have covered half of the TSA plate. However, the sample came from my phone only emerged about fifteen colonies at 37 degrees, and there were no any colonies showed up at 24 degrees. After my observation, I placed these two TSA plates back to different temperatures, and looked forward to having something different after four days when I came to lab again.
Day 7: Second Observation
Figure 5
Figure 6
After four days from the first observation, I did see some colonies showed up; also, most of the colonies grew bigger. According to Figure 5, there were four new colonies appeared from the sample of my mouth on the left plate, which was at 37 degrees. I thought these four colonies were new because they were bigger than other colonies remained the same sizes with the first observation.
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 8 was a big colony under microscope with 400x magnification from figure 7, which was the sample come from my mouth at 37 degrees.
Figure 9
Figure 9 was the small colonies from figure 7 under microscope at 400x.
Figure 10
Figure 11
Figure 11 was the picture from the microscope with 400x magnification from figure 10. The colonies were the sample from my phone and be placed at 37 degrees.
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
According to the labeled colony from figure 12 was different to the other colonies, because it looks bigger and lighter; also, it was covered by villus. I made a slide of this special colony and placed it under a microscope. I observed with 400x magnification. Figure 13 is what I saw from the microscope. The rest colonies were similar to the colonies from figure 10, but they were smaller. Figure 14 is what I got under the microscope at 400x magnification.
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 15 was the sample from my mouth at 24 degrees, the room temperature. What I found is that all those tiny colonies under the microscope with 400x magnification had exact the same picture of the sample from my mouth at 37 degrees.
I also did a mouth sample for my dish. My sample also had those tiny colonies. Comparing your sample with mine, it looks like yours grew on day 3 and 7 while mine stayed the same day 2 and 7.
ReplyDeleteDo you think the four new colonies may have been from contamination?
I also did a sample of my phone and I didn't see any growth at all so its interesting to see someone else who did have some bacterial growth from a similar test! I was thinking this was because the surface of our phones are constantly introduced to new bacteria making it harder for certain bacteria to grow or get outcompeted by new bacteria. Or another thought I had was that our phones are always getting touched by our hands that harvest bacteria at body temperature so perhaps this bacteria does not survive well on our phone surfaces at room temperature. Its interesting to see how much larger the bacteria from your phone in comparison to your mouth appear. I guess that would be comforting to know that the bacteria in our mouths are much smaller and not big and scary looking like the growth from your phone! Nice work breaking down your pictures into many different figure for analysis, it makes it easy to see the progression of bacterial growth from each day.
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