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Asked by elw125 to Aaron, Ananthi, Ashley, Christopher, Emma, Lea on 10 Nov 2017.
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Ananthi Ramachandran answered on 10 Nov 2017:
Great question! Sometimes bacteria from us can interfere with my work, e.g. if you don’t use good technique some of the normal/harmless bacteria that lives on or in us can get onto the agar (the jelly layer we use to grow our bacteria) and can contaminate our work! A lot of microbiology labs have windows that don’t open for the same reason, so our work doesn’t get contaminated by anything that may get blown in from the outside.
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Aaron Brown answered on 11 Nov 2017:
Yes, great question 🙂 Contamination is a huge problem in a microbiology lab, you have to make sure everything is completely sterile and clean.
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Emma Stevenson answered on 11 Nov 2017:
Yes, definitely! Sometimes to combat this we use very low levels of antibiotics on our agar growth plates(one we know our bacteria is resistant too!). If our bacteria grows then we know it’s the right one as most other bacteria won’t be resistant to that antibiotic.
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Christopher Richardson answered on 14 Nov 2017:
Oh yes, I cant tell you the amount of times I have contamination in my work and you can sometimes be looking at or investigating a bacteria that shouldn’t even be there and has come from either yourself or a piece of equipment.
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Ashley Otter answered on 16 Nov 2017:
This is a great question. We usually call this contamination, as they are microbes present in the air that can fall onto our agar plates. But to prevent this we either use a bunsen burner to cause like an ‘updraft’ to stop anything falling onto the plates or we use a biosafety cabinet that sucks air in, to prevent anything falling onto our plates
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