diluting and plating out your mushroom compost
This post is related to the third activity in your next practical - the one dealing with mushroom compost....
Part of this activity will involve re-suspending your mushroom compost sample into a solution, and then diluting this down using serial dilutions before plating it onto agar plates ready to grow for next week.
You may be feeling unsure about how to do these serial dilutions. Here is a quick schematic for what you will be doing:
Things to note from this figure:
- Obviously this week you will not see any colonies on your plates - these will appear for you to look at next week - I have drawn these on the above figure so you can see what to expect.
- The serial dilutions are all 10 x dilutions. i.e. each time you do a dilution you are diluting the cells 10 x.
- For the Novobiocin treatment (see table 1 on page 88 of your lab manual) you will plate out your undiluted sample and your 10-1 and 10-2 samples....any thoughts on why you use different dilutions for this one!?
Having a good understanding of what you are doing to your compost to end up with colonies growing on agar plates will be really important to you when you get your plates back, as you will have to use this knowledge and your plates to help estimate how many cells were in your original sample of mushroom compost....
Part of this activity will involve re-suspending your mushroom compost sample into a solution, and then diluting this down using serial dilutions before plating it onto agar plates ready to grow for next week.
You may be feeling unsure about how to do these serial dilutions. Here is a quick schematic for what you will be doing:
Things to note from this figure:
- Obviously this week you will not see any colonies on your plates - these will appear for you to look at next week - I have drawn these on the above figure so you can see what to expect.
- The serial dilutions are all 10 x dilutions. i.e. each time you do a dilution you are diluting the cells 10 x.
- For the Novobiocin treatment (see table 1 on page 88 of your lab manual) you will plate out your undiluted sample and your 10-1 and 10-2 samples....any thoughts on why you use different dilutions for this one!?
Having a good understanding of what you are doing to your compost to end up with colonies growing on agar plates will be really important to you when you get your plates back, as you will have to use this knowledge and your plates to help estimate how many cells were in your original sample of mushroom compost....
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