How screwed am I?

catzy5 · Oct 18, 2007

On Tuesday we began a three day lab unknown. One of the things we did was a streak plate. The problem is I blanked and didn't flame my loop in between streaking the 3 different areas.. Am I not going to able to get isolated colonies tonight when I go to lab? Or do you think I might be okay?
To clarify I dipped my loop into the broth once and streaked 3 areas with that. Wasn't I supposed to dip and flame in between each streaking?
Gah.. i'm not even sure I'm using the correct terminology.

you used one broth right? did you flame before dipping the first time? if you did then you should be fine, if you used 3 different broths and didn't flame between then I would ask to do it over again.

I made so many errors in micro, it was so frustrating I beat myself up constantly I knew what to do I took diligent notes but still I was so nervous I would screw up. I still made it out of there with an A but alot of extra work fixing my mistakes. Good luck to you.

catherine

Kina21 · Oct 18, 2007

On Tuesday we began a three day lab unknown. One of the things we did was a streak plate. The problem is I blanked and didn't flame my loop in between streaking the 3 different areas.. Am I not going to able to get isolated colonies tonight when I go to lab? Or do you think I might be okay?
To clarify I dipped my loop into the broth once and streaked 3 areas with that. Wasn't I supposed to dip and flame in between each streaking?
Gah.. i'm not even sure I'm using the correct terminology.

You are supposed to flame the loop between every section. This helps to separate out the colonies because you pull so much out of the broth to begin with. You should have time to do it again, I took micro as an 8 week class and had to do my streak plate twice because I didn't get fully separated colonies at first.

Our teacher taught us a trick to get it right every time. Use a sharpie to draw an outline of a box with one open side like |***| and number each section, make sure you have the lines intersecting. You just draw one down on each side and one across the top. You flame your loop, collect a sample, then streak it in area one, filling the area. Then flame the loop again and drag your loop through the side of area one into area two and "color" in all of section two. Then flame again, drag a little into area three, fill in area three, flame and then drag a few lines out from area three into the middle. You only collect a sample from the broth one time, at the very beginning, the rest comes from the previous area you streaked.

Hope it all works out for you! Good luck and let me know how it goes :)

LMRN10 · Oct 19, 2007

Well, flaming it gets rid of the excess on your loop and allows you to pull from the other sections, so your results would more than likely be different with flaming vs. not flaming. My suggest would be, if you have time to do it again (we did our lab final over two weeks), maybe try it again and see what happens.

Good luck!