Bench Work

It was 13 degrees below zero when I got out around 6:30am, and I wished I was on-call since this isn't a day I would want to leave the house anyway and a weather I wouldn't mind being on-call. But I wasn't.

Today I spent a little over two hours in the lab to streak out the bacteria that is part of my MIC (Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) study. Last Thursday, I had streaked out 68 distinct Clostridium difficile clinical isolates, which I now have to pass to new agar petri dishes for the susceptibility testing run planned for Tuesday.

What I'm doing is something that's not standard in most labs around (my mentor has one of the few NIH sponsored anaerobic labs in IL), and I'm testing 5 antibiotics that, to my knowledge had not been tested before. I had tried to explain the process to my friend Gerry sometime ago, and he exclaimed: "I don't even know what an anaerobic chamber is". Well, here's a picture. It's pretty much an enclosed space with mixed gases, so that the anaerobic bacteria like C. diff can grow.

The entire process I just learned several days ago, and this is the second time I was doing the some hands-on. I was rehersing the steps in my head:
(1) take the blood-agar plates out of the fridge and let it air-dry
(2) label all the plates
(3) retrieve the Thursday plates from the anaerobic chamber -- don't forget the settings so that the environment doesn't get altered
(4) Streak out the bugs from the old to the new plates
(5) Place the plates (new and old) into the chamber

I thought the process would only take me about an hour. I had overestimated my speed. I was perhaps being extremely careful, knowing what this bug can cause.

In the end, before leaving the lab, I whispered in the chamber: Please grow.

I then spent the rest of the day reading, then leaving a message for Angela, whose birthday is today (HBD Anj! See you soon!).