Week
5
Before I blog about this week’s
events, since people have been asking me about how I treat my microplastics (plastics
5mm or under) -- I wanted to let you guys know about the procedure I use. All
the methods can be found on my blog (Week 2, February 2, 2018) and I’m happy to
answer any questions anyone has.
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Figure 1: Contaminated Pseudomonas stutzeri on PIA media plate. |
This week was a setback. Out of our
sixteen plates (Pseudomonas species + plastic types 3,4,5, &6), four were
contaminated. By now the team has gotten used to Pseudomonas stutzeri turning
pink supposedly when “contaminated.” This happened twice last semester. We have
two hypotheses to why Pseudomonas stutzeri and Pseudomonas putida change
pigments to pink when growing. The first fair hypothesis is due to
contamination of other bacteria species mainly Serratia marcescens, a common
soil bacterium known to have a pink pigment. The second hypothesis came from an
article I was reading from. Since Pseudomonas stutzeri is an aerobic (needs air
to grow) bacterium when sealed with parafilm on media plates, it could’ve
morphed/mutated (I know, cool huh?) to an unknown species. This could be true
because Pseudomonas stutzeri is famous for denitrification (nitrate reduced to
nitrogen). I’ll make time this week or the coming week to try and isolate this
pink pigmented bacterium, and finally, have an idea of what we’re dealing with.
Wow Ibrahim, those two hypotheses are quite interesting! It’s great that you were able to find supporting evidence regarding the possible mutation of the bacteria. I wonder if there is a way for you to figure out which of these two has supporting evidence? I remember this was an issue last semester and am curious to know more about it!
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