January 5

Compared to the days before, today I am starting the real experiment. Actually this is a very basic experiment. If I understand it differently from the way you understand it, please tell me as I am still trying to improve here.
Below is a full description of the whole process of the experiment.

Title of experiment: culturing bacteria
Goal of this experiment is to testify the existence of bacteria from the samples of mucus given. Materials: 4 marine agar petri dishes, two sample of mucus (labelled as 11 and 22), parafilm, fire flame, inoculating loop, ethanol, tissues and permanent marker
Method:
1. Clean the laminar flow by spraying ethanol on the surfaces and. swipe it with the tissues.
Switch on the blower and light the fire flame after that.

2. Move the materials into the laminar flow and put it closer/around the flame.

3. The starting process of streaking the bacteria into the agar plate--
i. first, arrange the materials into a workable order, inoculating loop near the flame, 4 petri dishes on the side and mucus sample in the middle. Label the petri dish as 11a, 11b, 22a and 22b

ii. Sterilize the inoculating loop by flaming it using the fire and leave it to cool down.

iii.Open the parafilm of the mucus bottle and the petri dish.

iv.Open the cover of the fish mucus bottle gently and then flame the mouth of the bottle with fire.

v. Place the tip of inoculating loop into the bottle and make sure that the tip of the inoculating
touches the mucus.

vi. Take out the inoculating loop from the mucus bottle gently, open the petri dish, flame it a bit and streak the mucus into 1 quarter of the surface of the petri dish.

vii. Cover the petri dish immediately after streaking. Flame the inoculating loop thoroughly
and let it cool down.

viii. Repeat step iv to step viii until there are four different streaking strokes in the same
petri dish.

ix. Do the same for the rest of the petri dish/mucus samples.


4. Close the petri dish, bottle (mucus) with parafilm and put the sample back to the fridge
immediately.

5. Put the 4 petri dishes in ambient temperature or environment and leave it for 24 hours.

Result: After 24 hours, there isno clear growth sign seen. Experiment fail.

















11 a - no sign of growth















11 b- no sign of growth















22 a- no sign of growth














22 b- no sign of growth

Conclusion: The reason of failure of this experiment could be that the mucus sample that we are using is not fresh enough. I learn that next time I should use fresher mucus for experiment.