Essay On Unknown Bacteria

A culture of different species was brought to the lab to be analyzed in order to identify the pathogen causing disease. The goal of this lab was to be able to identify the unknown pathogen, match the patient to the bacterium, and being able to identify the disease it causes. At the beginning of class, the TA handed each student an agar plate containing some unknown bacteria, each one was numbered. Mine was number 14. The teacher then asked the students to use the techniques used in class (sterilize the inoculated loop, get a small amount of the unknown bacteria, incubate) to identify the unknown bacteria. To start, the unknown bacteria had to be successfully isolated. Using a wire loop, a small sample of the numbered test tube was plated on …show more content…
After we identify our unknown bacterium, we had to repeat the same step for the citrate agar and nitrate broth. We inoculated the loop, took a small amount of our unknown bacterium, and mixed it in our two tubes containing the citrate agar and the nitrate broth and waited until next lab to continue the process. When we came back next week, we then added two drops of reagent in the nitrate broth to see if the color would change. After doing every experiment, it appeared that the nitrate color was red and the citric agar turned blue while we identified our unknown bacterium as Enterobacter cloacae, a clinically gram negative, facultative-anaerobic, rod shaped and motile bacterium. E. cloacae infections can include bacteremia, lower respiratory tract infections, skin and soft-tissue infections, urinary tract infections (UTIs), endocarditis, intra-abdominal infections, septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, CNS infections, and ophthalmic infections. Enterobacter infections can necessitate prolonged hospitalization, multiple and varied imaging studies and laboratory tests, various surgical and nonsurgical procedures, and powerful and expensive antimicrobial