Microscopy Lab and Data

Good afternoon BIT 295 scholars, 

Great job in lab today, and thank you for your participation! It was a bit of a whirlwind, but that is to be expected in a 1.25 hr. lab…The important bit is that you all got interpretable data! That is more rare than you might expect in a laboratory setting. 

Just to recap, today you stained your unknown bacterial isolates with two different dies, which interact differentially with thick (gram-positive) and thin (gram-negative) cell wall structures. Everyone’s bacteria stained Green and not Red, indicating that the isolates are gram-negative (thin cell wall and an additional lipid bilayer membrane. The gram status of a particular bacterial species is a critically important for their ability to be treated with antibiotics, as many of our front-line antibiotics selectively target cell wall structures, and are, therefore, much less effective in treating gram negatives. 

Remember, we want you to get hands-on experience in the laboratory, but we also want you to understand why we are doing the things that we are in our time together.  

Your imaging data (three images: 1. GFP only 2. TxRed only 3. Multichannel overlay) is retrievable via our lab data Google Drive (see quick links). Please use it to work on your lab notebook reflections/questions, and think critically.  

See you Thursday!

Cheers, 
Dr. Huggins