BISC314:Materials
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.