Ah, spring – the warm sun, the green grass, the ability to wear anything less than a parka outside without freezing to death. While some students have spent the last couple of days playing frisbee on the quad or trying to remember how hammocks are supposed to work, I’ve been doing something even better: lab work. Okay, okay, I get that being in the lab probably doesn’t sound fun to most people when lounging around outside is finally possible, but I for one am having a great time.
Specifically, I’ve been hanging out with my UP – an affectionate acronym for “unknown prokaryote”. I’ll explain: my microbiology course is doing a term-long lab in which we isolate a mysterious microbe from anywhere we like (a leaf, the Sage elevator, that questionable wet spot in the Wellness Center sauna) by using a cotton swab. We then grow it out and spend 10 weeks putting it through a series of tests that will eventually help us to identify what species it is. My personal UP was isolated from a water pipe near the Fox River and is quite the beauty. It forms off-white, swirling colonies and when magnified at 100X reveals itself as adorable streptococci (in other words, chains of tiny spheres). Here’s a lovely glamor shot:
Cute, am I right?
We’ve already performed several tests on our little buddies, which have included Gram staining (to determine whether they have two plasma membranes or just one), spore staining (to determine whether they’re able to form heat and chemical resistant spores that can only be destroyed with massive amounts of pressure), motility assays (to determine whether they’ve got terrifying little flagella that can be used to swim around menacingly), and a whole load of others that can help us tell whether they’re invincible or not. This means that we’ve bombarded them with antibiotics like penicillin, soaked them in anitseptics or disinfectants like Bleach and Listerine, and tested their own microbe-killing superpowers against pathogens like E. coli. Mine’s resistant to penicillin which is pretty cool (and maybe a bit horrifying). At the end, we’ll isolate their DNA and then compare the results to our own morphological assays to see how awesome our detective skills are.
So many UP’s!
Overall, the whole process is an exciting way to conduct long-term laboratory work and learn about what’s hanging out in the Lawrence community. Just think! Students in my class will be able to tell all those frisbee-playing loungers exactly what they’re rolling around in or what may be lurking in the Fox River. The rest of the world may not be ready to know, but I sure am.