BISC209/S12: Lab9

Lab 9 LAB PRACTICAL
Today you will have a lab practical exam designed to assess your mastery of basic tools, techniques, and theoretical information on which the field of microbiology is based.

Assignment
Next week we will learn how to use the RDB (ribosomal data base, a public data base provided by Michigan State University) to analyze your sequencing results. Lab to be held in a computer classroom (TBA). Make sure you have signed up for an account on the RDB and received a username and password before you come to lab. Link to the RDB: [ https://rdp.cme.msu.edu/index.jsp]

Click on myRDP (orange sidebar on the left of the screen).

Click on "Not a user? Sign up!" and this will take you to a registration screen. Fill out the information required and then check your email. You will be sent a password. Go back to the myRDP site and login with your email and this password. It will then prompt you to change that password to something you can remember.

WRITE THIS DOWN! Don't lose your password!

Graded Assignment:Make a table of the tests performed on the isolates from your soil community (your isolates and your teammates from the same sampling site) and write a results narrative for it. You should include in the table: Gram stain, description of the colony morphology, description of the individual bacteria and any characteristic arrangement (cocci, rods, with descriptors ie., large, small, bullet shaped, in chains, etc.), evidence of spores (either endospore stain positive or visualization of empty areas in vegetative cells on Gram stain), & motility. Include the nitrogen cycling test but do not conclude that negative tests mean no nitrate reducing capability. Leave out the interaction assay and the antibiotic producers test in this table and make a separate results figure of a photograph of those plates and discuss those findings in separate sections in results. The table part of the results narrative might start out, "In order to show the potential for functional co-operation and competition among members of a soil community, nitrogen cycling bacteria & spore-forming bacteria were enriched and selected using media and protocols described in Materials and Methods. After isolation in pure culture these community members and others that grew on general purpose media were tested for production of diffusable antibiotic compounds against known Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria. Production of endospores were visualized in Gram stain and by Shaeffer-Fulton endospore stain. Motility testing was performed on each isolate using soft agar deeps. Evidence for a role in the nitrogen cycle was assessed by________. Table 1 shows the results of this testing." After this introduction, you can then analyze the findings shown in this table in order to then answer our experimental question, "is there evidence for functional co-operation and competition among the bacteria isolated from your soil community?" 

Links to Labs
Lab 1 Lab 2 Lab 3 Lab 4 Lab 5 Lab 6 Lab 7 Lab 8 Lab 9 Lab 10 Lab11 Lab 12