Last week was my fourth week in the Cheung Lab. It was pretty similar to the previous week because I was finishing monitoring the growth of the potentially cold-sensitive mutant MRSA strains in optimal and cold conditions. I continued to observe the optical densities of each strain using a spectrophotometer, making growth curves using the ODs, and finding/comparing the growth rates of each strain at different temperatures . However, this week the postdoc that I have been working with, Dhana, found a better equation for determining the growth rate of cells using ODs so I went through my past and present work using that equation to find the doubling time of each culture and making new growth curves.
Also, some of the agar plates from the primary screening had issues growing in the incubator because of an issue with air flow on the top shelf so the agar on the plate ended up shrinking and becoming contaminated. I re-picked each strain on agar plates to grow at this temperature to finish the primary screening.
After I finished picking colonies and growing/observing the mutant strains in liquid media, I made a master graph to compare the growth of the 50 strains at each temperature and to pick the most important strains (the ones that grew the slowest in cold conditions) to use during transduction. We are going to start transduction next week using two strains so I went over the protocol and streaked the two strains that exhibited the most cold-sensitive phenotype on a plate to grow over the weekend.
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