Question: What do you find hardest to do when studying Microbiology? Thank you :)

Joey Shepherd answered on 4 Jun 2018:

Hmmmm – I think the thing that our students find hardest is the names of the microorganisms – they are Latin, and usually long, like Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, or Acinetobacter baumannii. To make it easier we usually shorten their names (so to S.aureus, P. aeruginosa, or A baumannii). A favourite party trick is to prononunce Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans correctly! You do get used to it though, especially when you start to focus your research, sometimes to just one species.

Another thing that can be difficult to grasp is in infections – different microorganisms can sometimes cause the same disease, and one microorganism can cause different diseases depending on where it is in the body for example, so there is quite a lot to learn there.

Practically, in research it can sometimes be difficult to culture (grow) your microorganisms in the lab, because the ones you want to study might prefer very set conditions (such as nutrients, oxygen levels, temperature) that can be difficult to achieve. And you might end up with contamination from microbes you didn’t want to grow!

I had to think quite hard about this though because it’s really a fascinating and important subject and Microbiologists tend to love it, hard bits and all!