Introductory Microbiology Laboratory

∞ generated and posted on 2015.12.30 ∞

An opportunity to learn how to safely and effectively manipulate microorganisms under controlled conditions.

Introductory Microbiology Laboratory can be an unexpectedly challenging but ultimately useful as well as rewarding experience.

Microbiology for many of you will be your first 'serious' laboratory experience, that is, where it will be necessary not just to perform the required exercises but also to learn as well as practice various microbiology skills. The most prominent of these skills is what is known as aseptic technique, which is the 'art' of not contaminating with microorganisms yourself, your environment, others, or what you are working on. Indeed, one can easily argue that the primary thing that many will get out of taking microbiology, as a class, will be an appreciation of aseptic technique. This is not to denigrate the rest of your class or laboratory experience, but instead to call attention to the importance of aseptic technique to microbiology as well as health sciences more generally. To err is human, but it also can kill people in a clinical setting, and one important error to avoid is the transmission of 'germs' to others.

Microbiology laboratory also is 'serious' because the number of things that we will doing on any given day can be substantial, requiring some minimal level of organization to get through your various tasks effectively, efficiently, and with some intelligence. Key to doing this will be to read your laboratory text as well as to map out, at least in your mind, some sense of what it is that you will be undertaking on a day-to-day basis. The latter can be difficult to accomplish since it often isn’t easy to picture how one is going to undertake things that in fact one has never experienced, perhaps at any level. Indeed, you are taking microbiology at least in part to have those experiences for the first time. Your goal, therefore, will be more of achieving or developing a receptivity to what you will be doing in laboratory, that is, as those things become increasingly clearer in the course of both demonstrations and doing performing the laboratory procedures yourself so that you can figure out just what they will entail.

An additional consideration is that microbiology laboratory will tend to become much easier, to you, as the term progresses. This is because, as noted above, it will be necessary to both learn and practice various skills before you become reasonably proficient as a microbiologist, and only once you have those skills 'under your belt' will the tasks that you undertake in microbiology laboratory seem to be even potentially doable. As the term progresses, though, you may be amazed at how trivially easy it becomes to do what at first seemed impossibly hard. This actually is a good thing about microbiology laboratory: For all of the craziness involved, it can be a fairly rewarding experience!

Microbiology is a laboratory science and to fully appreciate microbiology it is necessary to learn microbiological techniques. Learning these techniques serves several purposes. First, it makes you both aware of and practiced at aseptic technique. Second, it allows you to better appreciate various concepts introduced in microbiology lecture. Third, it provides a foundation for performing microbiology laboratory techniques both in practice here and in subsequent classes.


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