Run and Tumble

Lab was the pick-me-up I had hoped for. The lab manager accidentally made the Pseudomonas stock broth way too concentrated, so our plates came back covered in the stuff.  They looked like giant, corroded pennies. The pigment was definitely neat. I took a whiff (and even convinced some lab mates to do the same), and while the odor of Pseudomonas aeruginosa is distinct andI can see how people describe it is a grape-smelling, from now on I’ll say that P. aeruginosa smells like P. aeruginosa. Interested students even stayed after lab to turn off the lights and watch it glow. It was not glo-stick awesome, but it was still nifty to see a flourescing bacterial pigment.

As a bonus, we actually got to use E-Tubes and API-20 kits (aka watercolors of pipetting hell) for enteric identification. We can’t use them for the unknown ID final exam, but they’re still way cool to play with.