While I was resting at the side, I noticed one of my friend was teaming up with his buddy again to spot each other's workout. It was kind of funny cause whenever my friend is working out, his buddy would spot and gave him lots of motivation like : 'come on', 'push', 'you're doing great', 'one more, one more', 'easy, easy', 'you can do it', 'dont give up', 'two more to go' and then keep on repeating the same thing for like 30 times in less than a minute. Wah, if I have such a 'motivating' spotter, I would have pulled out a gun and shoot him to oblivion even before I start my workout. Bising bangor. That's why I still prefer to workout alone with the earphones on.
Anyway, what I wanna blog today is actually my genetics lab session which I had yesterday. Ever wonder what a genetic student do in the fire-prone lab? First, we put on our lab coat which protect us from the potentially harmful chemicals and in the same time, make us easier to catch on fire. Most of the fire incidents start from the students hit and spill the alcohol unintentionally onto their long sleeves, then go near the bunsen burner and poof.... Jackpot.
The first thing we dealt with is the drosophila (fruit fly) that I mentioned in my last post. This is how it looks like when we got the specimens. They are still alive.
Yup, those tiny dots are the flies. The yellow medium at the base is made out of some banana + some basic nutrients that flies need to grow.
This is how we observe them. Put them on the white platform to get a clearer view on their eye colours, wing shapes and so on. No, we are not killers and the flies are still alive. We dont kill them just to observe their features. Then you might want to ask why arent they flying around? This is the reason.
We made them inactive first by giving them CO2... See the pipe? It is connected to the tap that leads to CO2 source. We get the CO2 gas just like how people get the gas for bunsen burner. The flies will be active again after they are removed from the CO2. But usually before that happens, we would discard them into the fly morgue and they will be dead. Muahahahaha.... there is another way of making the flies sleep, its by exposing them to ether. But this is not usually done especially by the novices, cause ether + fire will result explosion which is a lot worse than just catching fire.
This is aspergillus. A kind of fungi which we use to study the genes interaction and complementation... bla bla bla so on so forth. They got very distinguishable features which enable us to identify them easily. To grow them, you just need very little amount of spores and stab them into an agar plate with some nutrients, then they can grow and poliferate after incubation. Due to the fact that aspergillus need to be incubated, therefore experiment involving aspergillus need more than one week to be completed.
The plate above is actually provided to us by our demonstator. Thats the reason why every colony is nicely organised and there's no contamination between colonies. We do need to learn how to inoculate the aspergillus into new plates and it is really not an easy job cause the spores are too tiny and a little mistake will cause contamination everywhere in the plate.
This is also the time when fire accidents usually occur. Cause in order to inoculate aspergillus, we first sterilized the pen with metal wire attached on it by soaking it with alcohol and pass it through the flame for a brief moment. Then, we take some spores from the colony with the tip of a wire and stab it into a new agar plate. We stab the wire upwards with the agar plate facing downward to prevent the spores from spreading everywhere but still error can happens sometimes.
Our demonstrators always talk as if fire accident is no big deal. They said it does happens from time to time and when it happens in the alcohol petri dish, instead of panicking and watching the lab from burning down, please take the lid and cover the petri dish so the fire will stop. Wah, easier talk than do ler, do you think how many people can actually think of doing that when the alcohol is burning?
This is the plate that I did last week and it turned out to be quite nice. See how pro I am... Muahahaha... (ignoring the huge band of contamination across the plate) Very pro dy la, ok? Who want to comment banyak banyak one, gi la buat sendiri... cis...
WS
