Dear Research Organisms,
You know that I love you all and enjoy working with you for the most part, yeah sometimes I get jealous of the others with their bugs* that do not have to be incubated without oxygen like you but all in all you are great bugs. The fact that first B. breve, my shining star bug, stopped growing after the initial revival step. That was bad enough but then when I got up early so I could inoculate for the last run of my last rep (not counting redoing some runs that did not turn out after I am done with rep 3), I was so excited! Then I pulled you out of the incubator and only B. bifidum grew well, B. breve grew a tiny bit, and B. infantis and B. longum, nothing!
It makes absolutely no sense that you did not grow, you grew in the first step and that was coming out of the -75°C freezer. It would make some sense if you did not revive at that point but the second pass, why!?! I am trying again but this puts me way off my schedule! Thankfully the new schedule works so that I will still be able to see Doc on Monday, though of course I am quite nervous about this appointment since it is basically a one way ticket to referral land and I do NOT want to go there! You all are so not helping, you know stress is a trigger for GI issues right? I will admit, I stress you out with my simulated GI tract, I'm sorry but it is for your own good. Have you all gone bad and made some sort of deal with Helicobacter pylori??? Giving me an ulcer will make this take longer but it is not going to stop me so you might as well be good little bugs and grow like you are supposed to!
Yours,
Karen
~~~~~Copy LiteralDan Section~~~~~
*Bugs means bacteria or other microorganisms, it is a somewhat common nickname in my field and I use it a lot.
Getting back to normal
2 weeks ago
5 comments:
I'm thinking that winter in Iowa has gotten the best of you. Lol. I hope today is a better day.
I suppose this is akin to me writing letters to my illiterate children, right? LOL I hope they do whatever it is you want them to do!
i'm starting to worry about you micro. i'm pretty sure you're smart, but you, um, seem to be either failing or f'ing up your slides all the time. are you sure you didn't cheat to get to this level and you're really just faking it all??
oh, and maybe the fire next to the tubes changed the bugs by letting them hang out in a hot tub before being spread or something. lol sounds kinda like i know what i'm talking about huh? lolol
WeaselMomma: See if V reads this she would probably note that the cultures didn't grow and not think much of the rest since she has been the recipient of a few letters from the bacteria and possibly a letter or two to them. Also if you look in my archives I have another letter to bacteria, so this is just regular everyday the damn bugs are driving me crazy. Of course the winter does NOT help! I'll know tomorrow if they've done it again, they had best not!
Loren: You are so sweet to try and compare our children so I don't come off quite so nutty! I do figure that your kiddies will know how to read eventually whereas my bacteria will never gain that skill ;). I would like them to grow and when I run the actual experiment I would like them to behave as they did in all the preliminary studies and other reps I have run. Living things can be a pain in the butt to work with, now THAT can definitely apply to both my bugs and the kiddies, hehe!
Nonna: You snuck in there while I was replying to the others. And I am intelligent, not always smart and definitely always a little nuts. While I often question myself and my abilities when one looks back objectively over all of my work I definitely come out ahead. I don't write about how much of this rep and the previous reps came out perfect because while that is great it would probably be rather boring.
I suppose it is something I should work on, I am happy when I get good results but the bad, while in the minority really, is what gets my attention. Writing this post was my venting my frustration and trying to find humor so I can keep plugging along. Also I have not made a slide in I think months and I pretty much never fail at that, lol. Bugs not growing, either in broth or on plates, is just a fact of life that can drive one working with them insane.
Had those tubes been in that rack and by where it caught on fire that would actually make sense, not bad Igor! The tubes that were in that rack are tubes that had already been plated, it was my "waste" rack. The tubes that did not grow were in the cooler at the time of the fire and inoculated days after the incident. Temperature is very much something that can and will effect the growth of bacteria.
Post a Comment