Personal Blog #4

During the process for thinking about the independent project, I intitially didnt think we would be in groups though I suppose that would have been obvious with the limited time, space, and resources of the lab. Had I been fully aware of the group aspect, I likely would have suggested something similar but different. Exactly what I dont know, but probably something with more scale to it seeing as I wouldnt have to do it entirely alone. The idea I came up with though ended up working out, and was similar enough to another students idea to work.

When thinking about what to do for the independent project, I thought on the procedures for the Tiny Earth Project and what it was trying to do. It's goal is to find antibiotic producing bacteria from soil samples. This had me thinking, bacteria exist everywhere and different kinds exist in differing conditions. Theres going to be antibiotic producing bacteria everywhere where bacteria compete, and many of those bacteria do not thrive well in the standard conditions of ground soil. So what if we tried another bacterial source?

That raised another question, if not from soil, then where? Well, I had to think of a readily available source of large amounts of bacteria that would be easy and safe to get samples from. The immediate first thought was me, or more accurately, humans. Humans are teaming with bacteria and other microorganisms, and many of these have to compete with and fend off outside bacteria that we interact with. Now while there are many sources on the human body that could serve as a sampling site, the one that seemed the most obvious to me is the large groups of bacteria in the digestive tract. These bacteria are numerous, and also have to interact with all the bacteria in everything we swallow or put in our mouth. Since I also didnt feel like gathering and working with stool samples, saliva seemed like the perfect resource to test these human microbes.