HERE'S WHAT WE DID:
We were given nutrient agar plates which is pretty much a little petri dish with this gel like substance that has certain nutrients that inhibits bacterial growth. We used different bacteria for different oils. (Side note: I really wanted to use clove oregano and thieves but I was out of those. Sad day.) We divided our plate into 5 sections with a marker and labeled them with different times. 0 minutes was our control for the experiment. We used a sterilized loop to streak that section with the bacteria only. No oil. Just bacteria. That way we could see the growth WITHOUT the oils and compare it to the growth, or lack of hopefully, WITH oils.
We put 2 milliliters of our oil into a sterile tube and got 2-3 loops full of our bacteria and mixed it with the oil we chose and obtained samples from that mixture to streak our plate with. Kind of hard to visualize I know...much easier to see in person! But stick with me here!
We dipped our inoculating loop in that mixture and streaked the plates in the 5 different sections labed with the times. The times were in intervals of 0 minutes, 2.5 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes and 20 minutes. We would streak a specific section and wait (X) amount of minutes before we streaked the next one to see how the oils would hopefully decrease the amount of growth over time.
Shannon used the bacteria "bacillus subtillus" (which isn't pathogenic or anything but nonetheless it's a bacteria. And the point of this experiment was to test the oils affect on the growth of bacteria) and the oil she used was peppermint.
Justin used the bacteria "mycobacterium phlei" which is typically not pathogenic but there have been a few reported cases in which M. Phlei caused infections in individuals with compromised immune systems. The oil he used was melaleuca.
Janlyn used the bacteria "staphylococcus epidermidis" which commonly causes infections on medical devises such as catheters, shunts etc...it's known as an opportunistic pathogen which basically means it's only infectious if it has the proper environment to grow in. The oil she used was purification.
I used "E. Coli" which is more common for everyone I'm sure. It lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and while there are many different strands that cause many different things the most common way to come in contact with E. Coli is to eat infected meat that has not been cooked properly which causes an upset stomach. The oil I used was lemon.
We performed this test on 04-10-15 and placed our plates with the streaks of bacteria/oil in the incubator which is a toasty 37 degrees Celsius (body temp). Because bacteria (most of them anyways) love to grow at body temp. Convenient huh??
Y'all check back on 04-13-15 to see the results! Hopefully growth was very limited. Guess we will find out! I will be posting pictures and everything y'all don't wanna miss it!
