The experiment began by obtaining a sterile cotton swab and a petri dish and searching for a collection site in the Biology Department that would have bacteria. The unknown sample was collected at a recycling bin in Biology Building East. We swabbed the recycling bin using the sterile cotton swab and gently streaked the swab across the surface of the petri dish and immediately covered it with the lid. The petri dish was then placed in an incubator at 37C for two days. Two other petri dishes were obtained air and skin. The air petri dish lid was left open so airborne bacteria could land in the petri dish. The skin petri dish was divided into four sections for each lab member. We each pressed our fingerprints into the correct agar section to capture bacteria from our skin (Holbrook and Leicht, 2017). …show more content…
After assessing the three petri dishes we decided to use the recycling bin sample from the biology building. We began preparing for the PCR amplification of 16S Ribosomal RNA gene. We started by obtaining two 1.5ml PCR tubes containing 25 µl of 2X PCR Master Mix and a tube containing 300 µl of sterile water; labeling both tubes (B & C). In tube C, we added 5 µl of sterile water by pipetting and placed the tube on ice; this was our negative control. Using a sterile toothpick, we gently scraped a colony of the sample that we transferred into the remaining sterile water creating a live bacterial culture. The sample was vortexed to distribute the cells in the water (Holbrook and Leicht,