Monday, April 2, 2018


On Monday, we were able to see the results of the transformation of E. coli bacteria with the pGLO plasmid on Saturday.

E. coli growth!

We could see we got good growth of the E. coli bacteria on the plates, but it wasn't until we put it under a UV light that we could see if the transformation was successful.

Glowing E. coli! Success!


On Monday, I also learned how to gram stain. I got a good amount of practice performing gram stains on several slides containing P. fluorescens and D. aquaticus. I found the process to be a bit tedious, but it was worth it to see the end results under the microscope.

P. fluorescens

As expected, the P. fluorescens sample came out gram-negative.

D. aquaticus

My D. aquaticus sample came out gram-negative as well. There was some concern that I may have made an error in the gram staining process, since Deinococcus typically stains positive. However, the species aquaticus can stain as negative.


Friday, April 6, 2018


On Friday, we took our E. coli bacteria that we had transformed with pGLO plasmid and did an inoculation. We added an E. coli colony to 10 mL of LB and 5 microliters of ampicillin in 2 tubes, and placed them in the incubator to grow overnight.

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