Bacterial Isolate from Dog’s Mouth

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-Paper Title: Staphylococcus species isolated from dog’s mouth.

-Description: I chose to swab the bottom of my dog’s mouth for my bacterial isolate project, because my dog likes to lick my family members’ hands and faces. I isolated a bacterial species and identified it as a  Staphylococcus species that is similar to  Staphylococcus  pasteuri. Below is a picture of it under a microscope after Gram staining.

-Link to paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yi28cN2C0FysSf8GfLU7tWojOB1QgUU7/view?usp=sharing

Microbiology Menagerie

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Title: “Microbiology Menagerie”

I decided to make a collage of drawings that I drew from pictures of microbes in our textbook. I chose pictures that I thought looked cool/interesting. The title references a menagerie, which is “a strange or diverse collection of people or things.” This collage is diverse because it includes microbes from all of the (current) trees of life: Bacteria (Thiomargarita, Green Sulfur Bacteria, Purple Sulfur Bacteria, and Serratia marcescens), Eukaryota (Giardia intestinalis, Plasmodium falciparum, Volvox carteri, and Euglena) and Archaea (Korarchaeum cryptofilum). It is also strange, in a sense, because microbes can often seem strange to humans, in both their size and in their different lifestyles. I used a regular graphite pencil, colored pencils, and sketch paper to make the drawings.

A2: Microbes in the News #2

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-Article and Link:

“Exploring Copper’s Potential as Antibiotic.’ Source: University of Arizona News. Link: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/exploring-coppers-potential-antibiotic

-Summary: An immunobiologist at the University of Arizona is studying whether or not copper could be used as an antibiotic in the future. Bacteria need certain metals, like calcium and iron, to survive, but copper is toxic to them. They have a protein called CopY that controls how their cells get rid of copper, but exactly how it works is unknown.

-Connections: We’ve talked about antibiotics in class, and about how they target characteristics of bacterial cells that are different from eukaryotic cells. We also talked about how antibiotic resistance is increasing- thus, antibiotics targeting elements of bacteria that they haven’t yet developed resistance to might soon be needed.

-Critical Analysis: I found it interesting that macrophages (at least in the lungs) “bombard’ bacterial cells with copper, while depriving them of metals they do need, in order to kill them. I think the article was scientifically accurate (I trust it slightly more than I would if it were from a “regular’ news website, because it’s from a university- though that isn’t always a sure thing). I think it was well written. Most people have heard of pneumonia, so I think mentioning it at the beginning of the article was a good way to draw readers in. I think it did a good job of communicating science to the public- for example, it defined the term “macrophage,’ and explained why research into new antibiotics is needed.

-Question: Is copper also harmful to eukaryotic cells?

Painting With Microbes

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Jay Mayer, F03

 

My artistic intent was to make a turtle, since they are my favorite animal. This was done on an Eosin Methylene Blue (EMB) agar plate. I used  Escherchia coli  bacteria to make my drawing– they look off-white on a TSA plate, but black with a green sheen on an EMB plate. The agar did not change color, but the bacteria did. They first appeared to only be black, but a few days later they developed the green sheen seen in the picture above.  E. coli bacteria strongly ferment the lactose in EMB plates, which acidifies the EMB and causes the colonies of bacteria to turn black.