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Teachers
If you'd like to carry out these experiments with your middle school students, request reagents here
Getting ready
Lab materials to have and to know
Before you begin your work you should put on personal protective equipment as deemed appropriate by your school. These may include
- nitrile gloves,
- eye protection
- and a lab coat.
Techniques to learn
In
advance of the transformation lab will need to learn sterile technique (shown in "liquid ONs" video), how to use the pipets and how to spread the bacteria on the plates. Videos for these three basic
techniques are shown below.
One day before transformation lab
At
least one day before the transformation lab day, patch a small square of the bacterial strain called NB370 on an LB agar petri dish.
- Q1: what do we know or notice about NB370? does it smell like bananas? does it stink?
- Q2: what would you expect to happen if you patched these cells on LB media that has ampicillin or another antibiotic in it?
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