Throughout the weeks we’ve had in the lab, we have worked on a variety of things. We have been thoroughly sterilizing the lab, making brand new bacteria plates with kanamycin for future experiments, taking inventory, cleaning, and making broth. We did an experiment dealing with liquid culture and later recorded our results in a CFU assay. We then analyzed the results and tried to analyze if we did the experiment right or not. The liquid culture we grew turned out good, but we believe our experiment failed due to possible contamination or maybe having too much kanamycin on our plates. We are going to conduct another experiment soon to see if we did, in fact, contaminate or alter our experiment in any way. The purpose of our experiment was to figure out the optimal time to induce our bacteria with the turkey IL8 gene. By doing the CFU assay, we wanted to see when we have the optimal number of bacteria in our culture so we can induce them to produce the protein. We had to use the spectrophotometer every 30 minutes to see how much bacteria were in the liquid culture. We started the experiment at 7:30 in the morning and we had to examine the number of bacteria every 30 minutes until 3:00 p.m. We had to take the bacteria out of our samples and streak them onto plates, resulting in more than 100 plates. By doing this the first time, we possibly contaminated the plates since there were so many. I feel as if I have caught up a tremendous amount since we first started working in the lab, and I am very excited to see if our experiment will finally work the second time.
