BISC314:Full Protocol
LAB #1: Learning Sterile Technique and Field Trip to the Cheese Shop
Today we will be taking a trip in to Cambridge to visit Formagio Kitchen, a famous cheese shop in the area - they even have a cheese cave! Each of you will pick a cheese to be your microbial habitat for the next few weeks. We will sample a large variety and learn about where these cheeses came from. Let's be sure we have representative cheeses from these four main classes:
1. A blue cheese
2. A fresh cheese
3. A washed rind cheese
4. A soft, brie-like cheese
Back in the lab, we'll review sterile technique and inoculate media of various kinds from our cheese rinds. We will isolate a beautiful array of different microbes (both eukaryotic and bacterial) from these cheeses and in the next few weeks you'll be using them to investigate two major microbial community functions: growth interactions and chemical signaling.
LAB #2: Macroscopic and Microscopic observation of Isolates
You will have many different colonies growing up on your plates from last week. In your lab notebook, take some time to look at your colonies and describe their morphology, color, and smells! Does your Camembert inoculum smell like Camembert? You may find the following link useful for colony morphology descriptions: ASM MicrobeLibrary
Let's also look at our isolates under the microscope. We will make smears of our organisms
