Everything different

I have to say almost everything here is different from my ex-lab. I mean the facilities. 1. Lab There're 2 labs in Honey Research Unit (shortly "HRU"). Biological lab and chemical lab is separated. In biological lab there's another small room for manipulating non-NZ honey so that NZ and non-NZ honey wouldn't contaminate each other. 2. Cabinet Unlike my "laminar-flow-desk" in my ex-lab, this is the real biosafety cabinet. Clean air blows up from its surface so that no bacterial would flow out of the cabinet. As safety functions, its pane would fix on certain location that it prevents bacteria from leakage yet wouldn't be too difficult for operators to manipulate their microorganisms. As there is air flow, we can't use bunsen burner to sterilize our inoculating loop and needles. Instead, we use disposible ones. They are made of coloured plastic (blue for loop and orange for needle) and look like lollies more than experimental instruments! How cute!! 3. Storage Chemicals, agars, NZ honey and non-NZ honey are all stored in separated place. 4. Safety The biggest difference between my ex-lab and HRU. As we have seen in Cabinet and Storage, they have placed much attention on their safety. Lab coat, glove, gas handles, extinguishers and water hose, eye wash and body shower, etc etc etc. I used to sit at an old laminar-flow-desk located beside a noisy dry oven and containers of HPLC (or whatsoever) solvent waste in a small over-crowded room... 5. Documents Kerry has collected lots of useful documents and those were sorted in several folders, namely MSDS (Mechanicals Safety Data Sheet). I knew before that there're compatability issue between chemicals and gloves, but now I can find all these information in MSDS anytime. 6. Many other things There must be some more undiscovered things here. Now I wonder if my ex-lab can really be called a lab. ============================================== Anyway, I'll be practicing (and revising) some techniques in the following weeks. Today's task is serial dilution of manuka honey and bacteria culture. Here we use E. coli and S. aureus (not MRSA, by the way) as our "sacrice" and culture them on chocolate agar (they've got a sweet tooth eh?). The UMF of the manuka honey we use is 10+. The whole processes, including serial dilution, culturing and streaking, were not that difficult; except... (1) Picking (or alternatively, "fishing") the culture beads from small vials (2) Weighting the manuka honey - I never know that the "real" honey is so sticky that it's just like peanut jam!!