It’s 9am on a late spring morning and Sarah Beane, Laura Brown, Hayley Brudzinska, Gemma Bowey and I have dragged ourselves from our beds and into the University of Lincoln Science Building where we dived straight into the scientific action in the form of, well… paperwork. Before we could start doing anything close to “exciting”, Dr. Ross Williams; our mentor for the day, handed us a COSHH form which stands for ‘Control of Substances Hazardous to Health’. It outlines what could be dangerous to us and others, and the necessary precautions required to prevent the occurence of harm. With the necessary “evil” of paperwork out of the way it was up to the second floor to don our lab coats and enter the preparation lab. tThis lab contained the chemical ingredients for our next task; which was making nutrient agar. Nutrient agar is the most commonly used growth medium for bacteria and is also quite tough to find when surrounded by numerous other shelves of similar looking cartons. With a quick stop off at the ‘glassware closet’ to pick up a conical flask, it was off to the research lab. which looked; in all it’s “panoramic glory”, like this:

Once we had finished taking pictures of the research lab, it was time to prepare our agar. The process we carried out was as follows:

Simple, yes/no? The resultant nutrient agar should look this:

With the liquid agar made up, our stomachs were signalling the start of lunch and the group discussed the possibility of making a blog to document the next two weeks, and, as you may have noticed we decided it was a good idea.