Day two essentially follows on from where day one left off,  but the early mornings are still a shock to our “student systems” as we rather quietly arrive at the University of Lincoln Science Building. The first task of the day is to track down the bottles of agar we made on the previous afternoon and transfer them to an autoclave (a pressurised high temperature steriliser) where any unwanted “baddies” (such as bacteria) would be completely destroyed, leaving only clean, fresh and nutritious agar to pour onto yet more Petri dishes. Unfortunately though, autoclaving can be something of a time-consuming process, seeing as the contents of the machine are heated at a toasty 121°C for quarter of an hour. So it is swiftly onto task number two; using the now set agar plates made from yesterday’s batch and producing “streak” plates for the vials of microbes that call the research laboratory their home, and there seems to be quite a few bottles of them…

With the number of available plates, the group of us was subdivided into two pairs and a “three” and set to work on producing a “streak” plate for every microbial sample. But whilst we were in the full flow of producing streak plates, several vials of the same microorganism were discovered, with the condition of each vial ranging from the appearance of being pale and healthy to dark and dry. Because of this, a new form of agar was introduced to Lactococcus lactis; M17, an agar that was far better suited for our numerous microbial samples and one that would be further used as our microbial cataloging project went on. As time went on, the number of available plates dwindled, meaning that it was then a waiting game for the other flasks of agar to cool down and be ready for handling and pouring. So, lunch time it was. But not before we had made a note of the names of the microbes on the vials in order to catalogue them at a later date.

After lunch it seemed that it was then the time to set about the large task of producing yet more nutrient agar plates. The agar had to be in what can only be described as the ‘goldilocks zone’, meaning that it was neither too hot to handle or too cold (“said baby bear”) to pour. When the agar temperature at around 55ºC is the best time to start the assembly of agar plates, and for this project there was to many plates made. 1 Litre of agar solution would comfortably  make around 40 plates, so with 6 Litres there was to be around 240 plates sitting on lab. benches by the time we had finished. And so it was that we began pouring with as much care and as steady a hold as possible, leaving ourselves surrounded by plates of agar:

Once the hundreds of plates had set, it was back to the world of sterilised wire loops, deciphering labels and letting nothing touch the desk that could possibly be contaminated, as microbes such as fungal spores like to float in the air; waiting for their chance to find a nice home and grow to their “hearts content” (a lovely thought on which to finish today’s post).