Here's the lab day(s) post you have all been waiting for!
And guess which potentially harmful germ we dealt with: E coli!
Don't worry, it was completely harmless.
Basically, we were testing the gene regulation in the E coli bacteria by inserting arabinose and GFP (glowing genes). Except, most of us didn't know that yet. We all thought we were going to die.
There were four different petri dishes with different environments. One just had the E coli bacteria, one had the E coli bacteria and ampicilin, another had the bacteria, ampicilin, and the GFP, and the last one had everything: the E coli, ampicilin, arabinose, and GFP.
We did a lot of heating and cooling (pictures below) and then we stored our bacteria in an incubator. And then, we waited.
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| E coli with arabinose. It glowed! Sorry for the bad picture |
So during the next few classes, we evaluated our outcome.
All of the bacteria grew in all the petri plates, but only the one with arabinose glowed.
Why you may ask? The operon system!
Am I going to explain to you what it is? Heck no! Not here anyways. That's what my next lab report is going to be on. The link will be in my next blog post.
Next class, it's test day.
Until next time.
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