Spouse and I got a little crazy the other week and placed a fairly aggressive order from the American Science & Surplus Web site. And now, after a rough Monday led to a little spontaneous and pleasant tinkering in the kitchen, I found myself with 19 petri dishes full of fresh nutrient-rich agar and no plan.
The picture shows you how hot, freshly poured agar steams up a petri dish. Or 19 petri dishes. Why 19? Because it was a pack of 20 and I totally flailed one.
In case you ever find yourself trying to figure out how to pour boiling hot agar into 19 petri dishes (and honestly, who hasn’t), I strongly recommend a plastic squeeze bottle, like they use in restaurants. Worked like a charm.
So here’s what we’ve wrought:
- Me
- Spouse
- Lucia
- Mourka
- Kitchen sink
- Kitchen sponge (God help us all)
- Pot
- Kettle
- Shoe
- Bathroom sink
- Toilet
- Control swab (a swab that is right out of the package)
- Control (no swab)
Which leaves us with six blanks. When I grow something gross, we’ll pick a good sample and propagate it. Then, for an encore, we’ll test some of my favorite household cleansers against it.
Now, we’re at the 24-hour mark, and the kitchen sponge has an early lead. Can’t wait to see how this progresses.
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Suggestions for blank pietri dishes:
- Laptop keyboard. I’ll bet there’s a cure for baldness growing on my ThinkPad’s nipplemaus.
- A Metro escalator tread.
- The (tasty, tasty) water that the hot dog vendor at Dupont Circle (re)uses to boil his dogs.
- The surface of the bar at The Big Hunt or Madam’s Organ. It’s bound to grow something illegal, infectious, or both (“Ooh! SARS, Herpes, and Cocaine!)
- Second the keyboard or mouse
- Television remote
- Fridge butter shelf or fruit drawer
- Steering wheel of the car
- Water fountain nozzle
Okay, I can no longer lurk, I must comment!
I spend a ridiculous amount of my time pouring hot agar into petri dishes, so a few suggestions… once it solidifies, turn it over (so it’s on it’s lid, with the agar hanging down from the “roof”). This both discourages bugs in the air from landing on your agar and allows condensation to evaporate before it drips on your agar, disturbing your nice round colonies. Also, once it’s free of condensation (about 24 hours in a nice dry room usually does it) you might think about wrapping the edges of the plates up with saran wrap, also to discourage the bugs in the air from getting in and messing up your nicely controlled experiment!
Finally, as an interesting control… how about you take some nice household antibiotics (leftovers, from the cat, whatever), sprinkle it on a dish, and see what a few choice samples grow. You could see if you can get some nice antibiotic resistant bugs from, say, that kitchen sponge…
You could try taking a mortar and pestle and grinding up any antibiotics that you have left over from the last time you were sick. Take an eyedropper and see if you can kill of the colonies. SimCity in a petri dish with you as Godzilla.
You could also see if beer encourages or discourages growth.
And for the denouement, there’s always the final dilute 10% bleach over the agar to kill off the colonies before you toss out your experiment. That’s the Extinction Level Event as far as the microbe world is concerned.
But if you hear tiny voices in your sleep praying to you as a god, then the bacterial PPM count in your kitchen may have risen too high. “Even though you can’t see or hear them at all, a person’s a person, no matter how small…” Not. Horton was killed by a raging infection from all those Whos in Whoville.