Work in the Lab

We’ve learned a lot since we first got in school. Working in the Biotechnology lab is something eye opening and it makes you feel more professional working and knowing what you have to do. We learned how to properly sterilize our work environment before conducting an experiment or handling bacteria to avoid contamination. We’ve been working with E. coli bacteria recently (E. coli HB101 to be exact). We first learned how to properly handle bacteria and make sure not to breathe in the Agar powder and to handle the plates carefully to avoid exposing the bacteria. Agar is used as bacteria food in order to help them grow and make the colonies we need. Our first experiment was trying to make the bacteria glow when exposed to a UV light. By doing so, we needed to insert a gene into the bacteria found in jellyfish. We wanted to see if we could add the gene into the bacteria through heat shocking. We did not know for sure if it would work so we did the experiment. We had to keep the bacteria very cold to keep them sealed, and then we’d expose them to heat to make them swell up and expose pores, which would allow us to insert the GFP gene that will allow them to glow. After doing that, we had to put the bacteria back into the cold environment to make them seal up and trap the gene inside. The plates we had streaked had arabinose to help the bacteria activate the GFP gene and hopefully illuminate the colony. All of this had to be done in about 10 or 15 seconds, so there was no room for error. When we got back the next day, we had glowing colonies.

Then we took those bacteria colonies and streaked them on 4 different plates to see which one had growth and if they could glow. Our plates were -pGLO LB, -pGLO LB/amp, +pGLO LB/amp/ara, and +pGLO LB/amp. We wanted to see which plate grew the bacteria and most importantly, made them glow. We found out that the bacteria in the +pGLO LB/amp/ara plate grew and could glow, so we took the bacteria from that and streaked them onto a separate plate to see if they could still grow and we found out that our experiment worked.