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Well Hello there, my name is Razin Syahmi and I belong to group 1 in our lab

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week 1 also known as breaking the ice week for me. We get to know Dr. Su! yayyyy. In this week's class, we learned about lab safety and get a tour of our lab. Lab safety wise, we learned of what to do when things go wrong and the multiple bio safety levels (BSL). The higher the BSL of a specimen, the more dangerous it is. Also we get to look at all these fancy things in the prep lab

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Time for some real experiments. For this week we get to play with fire! I mean we get to practice aseptic technique. A technique to ensure there is no contamination when doing experiments. We get transfer specimens cultures into agar slant, culture broth and agar deep. It was a truly fun experience and also my hand was really shaking due to nervousness.

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More culture transfers yayyyyyyyy. For this week, we get to do more culture transfer techniques, the new ones being streak-plating and spread-plating. It was really fun and very intriguing as there are multiple ways to do streak-plating. This was our results

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It's microscopy time. For this week we looked at stained samples under a microscope and we also learned how to measure the size of the microbe itself. Mine was Saccharomyces Cerevisiae commonly known as yeast. The key points of this microbe is its budding feature.

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time for some live microscopy. Now we do microscopy on some wet samples. Samples which have living microorganisms. Well sadly I didn't find any but technically I did found some just it ran away from my view and then I wasn't able to find. So in a technicality, I did find some. What we did to be able to view a living organisms under a microscope is prepare a hanging drop slide and a wet mount slide.

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It's staining time. For this week, it's all about staining. Simple staining, gram staining, acid-fast staining and negative staining. We used multiple dyes for the various staining like crystal violet, nigrosin, carbolfuschin and many more. Here is a sample of my negative staining of Bacillus cereus.

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IT IS TEST WEEK. Well earlier on the day, we had an experiment on capsule staining and again I couldn't get it to do so I asked Dr. Su for help. She said the viewing is already great, only that my slide was problematic so the others chipped in their slide of the same sample but it was the same no samples could be observed. Here is one of my groupmates sample.

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Thank you for the 7 weeks of learning Dr.Su

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For this experiment, what caught my eyes was the vast amount of media used to isolate and incubate microorganisms and these media are only the tip of an iceberg. There are many more types of media used to isolate microorganisms and grow them. For this week, I had fun streaking the cultures on the various media agars like the blood agar and the MacConkey agar and if I do say so myself, I did a great job with no hiccups in the process. In the picture above is the product of my group's effort on streaking the various types of media. What intrigued was the bacterial colony growth as well as their colours. One of them was glinting with a sheen of shiny green.

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For this week we tested the microorganisms ability to grow in a variety of different physical environments that changes on their pH, temperature and oxygen levels. It was really cool seeing microbes growing in a non-humanlike environment namely high and near- sub zero temps, high and low pH as well as environments with no oxygen. The microbes can be categorized in many different ways such as thermophiles where they optimally grow in high temps, acidophiles where they prefer highly acidic environments and anaerobic microbes where they don't need oxygen to grow. What I was questioning was that some microbes can grow in conditions where they are oxygen as well as no oxygen. Well these microbes are called facultative anaerobes where they can grow in both conditions. On a side note, we had our first lab accident in the semester which included a FIRE. The lab assistants were quick about it and sealed of the gas line that was fueled the bunsen burners. But all in all, the skills that I performed this week was at an accomplished level in all aspects

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For this week, it was interesting to say the least. We get to experience and see what will happen when we dilute the cultures that are provided to us. So full disclosure, this week was really interesting because we get to pipette cultures and that is one of my favourite lab procedures. So we inoculated various levels of dilution on a nutrient agar and lo and behold COLONIES. The colonies that grow in the nutrient agar are sometimes just the right amount and sometimes just way too much which the lab demos call TNTC which stands for Too numerous to count and WAY too little which lab demos call TFTC (too few to count). For the second part of the experiment, it was a painful yet rewarding procedure. It involved counting all the single microbial colony. There was A LOT of counting but we were invited with a new apparatus that helped us to keep count of the number of colony while we were counting and marking the colonies on the agar. The picture above are one of the petri dishes that we marked. It had 299 single bacterial colony. Overall, this week has been quite fun and the skills that I show are quite accomplished but somewhat examplary.

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Honestly this is probably one of the monumental phase in my life because I really like to do experiments as a whole. This subject itself was really fun. It had its ups and downs but there was sooooo much to learn and yet there was really not enough time to really savor the moment itself. Yes, the information was digestable but I feel like I didn't have enough of my fill during this semester. I hoped to do more when I have the chance and I really wish that I can ,like lab demos, help with this subject in the future and see the growth of young minds. Overall, I think my psychomotor skills throughout the whole semester was accomplished.