The first attempt at the experiment was relatively unsuccessful: all of us learned a great deal about laboratory procedure (maybe it was better to make the rookie mistakes on a batch to be thrown out, anyways!), but none of us were able to successfully plant our phage. We tried it all again, though! A few people did find some sort of result, but those were mostly due to contamination.

I had an interesting sort of contamination, though. When I was creating my agar plate, using the streak-test technique, I accidentally used an arthrobacer-sp tube that Carter Lantz was using to set up his Plaque-Assay experiment. Due to my mistake, the plate I made had double the bacteria and two different sets of phage concentrate in it. I though I had ruined the experiment and tried to throw it out. However, Dr. Gibbon and Dr. Adair caught me before I threw it out and encouraged me to incubate the sample and let it grow. I figured “Why not?” and I am very happy they stopped me from throwing it out. Whatever was going on with that bacteria and the phage had some interesting effects. After it grew for two days (09 September-11 September), I checked it and the bacteria had grown like crazy and around some of the major colonies of bacteria, there were areas that had become absolutely clear of everything: bacteria, plaque, agar, everything, all gone. This means that whatever happened to grow in that sample had some sort of antibiotic property to it.

For the agar to have disappeared, something must have consumed it: implying that there was something that grew there. However, looking at it on Wednesday, the whole area was clear: implying that something else killed it or it moved, something must have happened. I went back in today to go check on it (two more days later) and it appeared as if the colonies were starting to regrow over the areas that had been previously cleared.

I have no idea what is going on here, but that is the beauty of research! It may not be 100% related to the SEA-Phages project, but I hope to keep looking into whatever happened here. Maybe another research project someday!

I’ll upload the pictures in just a few minutes.