3:30 to 5:30pm, November 9, 2004
On Tuesday, 9 November 2004, I visited the workplace of
Biologist B.CI.3. She is a 6th
year PhD student studying microbiology, studying how E coli exhibits antibiotic-drug
resistance. Her field sites
consist of hospitals, where she is not authorized to actually take samples. The
way she gets her data is “from doctors and nurses” in hospitals.
There's a difference between wild and domesticated strains
of bacteria. She studies
phenotypes/genotypes of these cultures.
In her lab, there's actually a big culture of shared work. There are a
lot of shared resources, so it is easy to help someone else move a set of
beakers, etc. To remember to do the shared work, she usually writes notes to
herself.
For these drug-resistant bacteria, there is usually only a
single nucleotide of difference.
Another difference she controls (in her cultures) is the cost of
resistance, which is basically how much less efficient bacteria is at
replicating (less fit it is in the Darwinian sense) when it mutates into a drug
resistant strain.
She studies evolution, evolving strains. She studies the continued evolution,
which is the evolutionary trajectory of her strains. She also studies the bottlenecks; the compensatory
evolution, and the growth media.
There's a difference
between the 1/100th samples, which she will transfer to fresh media, and there
are also the 1/1000 samples.
Basically, she sees whether growth rates depend on the drug
resistance and the fitness of different strains.
For transferring of cultures from flask-to-flasks, her tasks
take on the order of hours. She will group flasks that are related, so that she
can handle batches at a time. This rigorous process is very internalized after
you've worked at it for awhile.
“Menial labor sucks.”
Menial labor includes things like counting plates (# cultures on petri
dishes). To do this, she holds a counter in one hand, and marks a petri dish
with the other (holding a marker). The marking and clicking of the counter is
synchronized. The petri dish is viewed under a lighted display.
Her experimental setup is such that there are 20 strains of
4 treatments each. While transferring media, she periodically changes her
gloves. In the lab area, she uses a Bunsen burner to “sterilize” beaker edges,
and to create an updraft in her work area. She also will use ethanol 70% to
clean up any spills, which she actually used several times during my visit. She
uses equipment such as autoclaves which run at 121 degree Celsius at 21 lbs.
per square inch.
Initial Interview on a Table
Transfers
Freezing
Plate Counting
Agitation
Follow up on
Notebook usage
Collaboration
Analysis of Statistics
JMP (“Jump”) Statistical Software from www.sas.com.
The Audio Transcript and my Interpretations
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