Fish and a polluted environment.

At the moment, I'm collecting and isolating different bacteria off of crickets. I've only got as far as gram staining them but, the stains look pretty interesting under the microscope. The most interesting so far are gram negative cocci which form colonies that look like flowers under the dissecting stereo-microscope (good for colony morphology). Their structure is really interesting (to me anyway) when stained and observed at 100x; they are bunched together to form pentagons (roughly) with space in the middle and the cells forming the boundaries. Maybe this is common, but I've never seen it; it seems very ordered and symmetric. I made a permanent slide of it today with cytoseal which should be ready to view tomorrow via oil immersion and maybe the video scope. I'll be sure to post some photos. FYI, if you're trying to collect bacterial samples my best results were with Peptone using 100-300 microL dilutions worked well to gather bacteria from the crickets. The direct swabs yield a useless mass of growth where it was too difficult to isolate anything.

I was speaking with one of our instructors today about the focus of my research this semester and he suggested perhaps working with either fish and a polluted (with one specific pollutant) environment vs unpolluted. If we can't get fish in the lab, I'll try crickets with polluted water sources or maybe even plants. One possible pollutant could be 4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol - which was in the news recently from West Virginia as a side effect of coal processing. It's not entirely understood how this affects humans. I'll do some reading how it might affect anything else. A fun side note - we just learned how to name organic compounds like this in o-chem, which isn't as bad as it looks. I could also continue working from 182 with eutrophication. Maybe I could test how it affects bacterial growth in organisms with in the waters. 

I also identified my unknown bacteria today: Micrococcus luteus. I did an extra motility test because although it wasn't needed, I read they are highly motile and wanted to see this. Also, I'm going to try to extract dna from the sample and see if it matches. Below are photos of my sample of Micrococcus luteus. on isolation TSA, lawn TSA, MSA (negative for manitol fermentation) plate, and a pre-iodine starch plate (was negative).