Since this was the last week of the quarter, we didn’t require the students to blog as in the previous 9 weeks. Also, mostly we recapped what had happened in the class and discussed various assignments. But the students did measure the antibiotic resistance of their strains, and we also had a powerful demonstration of …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week we focused on antibiotic sensitivity on the individual bacteria that were identified last week. The day before class, the bacteria that we have been working with all quarter were recultured in …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) The last seven weeks of laboratory and computer work have been a mixture of successes and failures that eventually brought us to Week 8. The goal of this week was to build phylogenetic …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week in lab we finally identified our microbes! The past six weeks have been a culmination of lab work, both successful yet sometimes frustrating, to bring us to this point of finally …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week’s goal was to successfully perform PCR cleanup. Last week we performed gel electrophoresis to determine if there was a positive or negative PCR result. At the end of last week, a …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) The original goal of this week was to perform DNA clean up via a PCR clean-up kit, but unfortunately the kits were on backorder. Thus, the focus of the class shifted to gel …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) Polymerase Chain Reaction Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplifies a small amount of DNA into a much larger amount of DNA within a short time. The purpose of this lab was to prepare the …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week we set out to extract DNA from isolated bacteria grown in liquid culture to further analyze it. Students in the lab were assigned test tubes containing tannin degrading bacteria which have …
You know sometimes you use a working title for something for long enough that it becomes the title? Like “Snakes on a Plane”. That’s what happened in this case, we also meant to come up with a name for this class… never did and so the official name at the registrar is “Koala Poop”. Awesome. …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) The goal of this week was to isolate a single bacterial colony for further study. This week we observed bacterial growth from our koala poop samples. With a partner, we obtained and observed …