Figure 2

Figure 1

The first week as an intern is almost over, and I feel excited about the rest of the semester. This week I started my project in identifying my unknown bacteria, but I have had some drawback along the way. First of all, I am not very familiar with bacteria, but there is always Josh who has helped me a lot this week. In addition, there are also a lot of friendly experienced S-STEM scholars willing to help.  I have made some progress in identifying my unknown, but it is not as much as I wish I had done.  My results so far have been growing a bacterial lawn (Figure 1), and isolating a bacteria colony successfully (Figure 2).  However, I didn’t have as much bacterium growth on the lawn plate as I should have had. In addition, I have correctly concluded that my unknown was cocci, but made some mistakes on my gram staining and couldn’t find out if it was gram positive or gram negative. Tomorrow I will be performing it once again, and hopefully this time I can succeed!!!