Question: What was your favorite a-ha moment

Katie Fala answered on 13 Nov 2019:

That’s a good question, thanks Eliotg123! So far, it was probably just getting my screening experiment working well. It took lots and lots of attempts as the indicator bacteria (Chromobacterium violaceum) that I use to detect bacteria that quorum quench (i.e. stop other bacteria from talking with one another) was very troublesome to get growing well and reproducibly. I had a lot of messy agar plates where the Chromobacterium hadn’t grown uniformly, was contaminated with other bacteria or just wasn’t producing the purple colour evenly across the plate. I had to repeat it many times, changing different variables and considering that each run of the experiment took me 4 days, it’s fair to say I got pretty sick of it and wanted to give up tbh. I kept on trucking though, and when I finally perfected the protocol and saw even purple plates, with these two little translucent halos (this means that the bacteria growing on those spots have stopped the Chromobacterium cells talking with oneanother) it was a pretty rewarding a-ha moment. Also, getting the results of the identities of the promising bacteria I’ve found after extracting their DNA and getting it sequenced was pretty exciting. Hopefully there’ll be more ‘a-ha’ moments…