Mystery TSA Plates by Tyler Klaudt

DAY 0: I wanted to test items that were used in my everyday life. I wanted to know how much bacteria were lurking on the items that I come in contact with everyday. The four items I chose were my phone, palm of my hand, sole of my shoe, and my mouth. I took a swab of each sample and placed them into two different petri dishes. One which I would incubate at room temp like my shoes and phone are at most of the day and also at 37 degrees Celsius. This is close to what its like for body temperature.

DAY 1: Coming in, my prediction was that I was going to see large amounts of bacteria on my phone and almost as much in the rest of my samples. I did think the warmer samples would grow faster but all were going to have large amounts. To my surprise sole of shoe and palm of hand at 37 degrees Celsius was really the only two that showed a difference in the days. The people that always said your phone was a place with a ton of bacteria was wrong. Almost clean enough to eat off. Not really. I would not recommend doing that.

DAY 7: We can now see growth in all 8 of the swabs. Although still not as much as I would think in my mouth and on my phone, the palm of my hand and sole of my shoe took off. My mouth at room temp had 14 small yellow dots and at 37 degrees Celsius had one medium size one with hundreds of the little yellow specks. My phone at room temp had three dots and 37 degrees Celsius it had the same amount on the dots were larger. The sole of my shoe at room temp only had seven yellow dots some dots were darker and lighter then others. At 37 degrees Celsius you can see four distinct shades of yellows with the duller yellow color taking up the whole quadrant. The brighter yellow dots were mixed with in. This is the first one in my opinion that starts to look cool. Now for the one that was most successful, the palm of my hand. At room temp there are 11 varying size colonies at varies colors and at 37 degrees Celsius that number goes up to about 30 colonies and it takes up the whole quadrant. There is also a weird branching look to it. Because this one looked so interesting. I decided to take a closer look at day 7 sole of shoe and try to identify some of these bacteria.

Figure 1 Sole of Shoe at 37 Degrees Celsius

Unfortunately, after looking closer, I wasn’t able to identify any bacteria and match it with any known bacteria or picture I had even with the 400x magnification I was using. My results from this experiment did not match what I thought I would find. I thought there would be much more bacteria on surface’s like my mouth and phone, but it looks like I’m cleaner then I assumed.

This was an interesting experiment to be able to see what kind of bacteria we had growing in our everyday items. Although not my experiment, I saw that there was a ton of bacteria on the biology sink which was surprising to me. There were more bacteria on the sink handle then the toilet. I guess its safe to say its better not to wash your hands. Only kidding.