Bacteria phages

This past weekend my dad and I biked down the DNA learning center for a Saturday DNA. This session was all about bacteriaphages. You might be wondering what bacteriaphages are? They are little viruses that attach to certain bacteria cells. Did you know that bacteriaphages are everywhere … in the oceans, in the soil and even in food.

The experiment we did used bacteriaphages to kill E.coli. In this experiment we made our own mix of bacteriaphages then plated it to a robot after that we incubated it with [        ]. The bacteriaphages we used were labeled T4 and T7. We did this by pipetting 60ml of T4 and 40 ml of T7 into a test tube that we were provided with. I love doing pipetting so this was especially fun.

Then we gave our test tubes to … a ROBOT! It used a pipette with his “finger” to transfer our mixture to the E.coli. After this finished we put the E.coli into a machine to excellerate incubation!

This one would measure how the E.coli reproduced.It could then measure when the mixture kicked in and the E.coli died. It was very cool seeing all these amazing robots work and learning about bacteriaphages.

I also did bactriaphage art. We used a laminated picture of a virus and then I pipetting drops of food coloring on the picture. Then I put a sheet on it and it obsorbed the food coloring . I love how it turned out.

Did you know that bacteriaphages are used in the food industry to improve food safety and quality.In the food industry they code bacteriaphages target specific bacteria that they do not want. Remember when boars head had the listeria outbreak. Well, that is because they didnt use bacteriaphages!