Tales from the Lab #8: The Lab Mascot
Sports teams have mascots, fast food restaurants have mascots, even cereals have mascots. Why can’t scientists have a mascot? At one of my previous workplaces, we set out to find one. When you work in a microbiology lab, there are many potential candidates for the proper mascot, and all of them are alive.
During my time at the clinical lab, it was commonplace to find E. coli, Staph, Strep, Pseudomonas, and Clostridium in a set of samples. By commonplace, I mean that it happened every day. We also tested samples for fungal contamination, and while that wasn’t as frequent as bacterial, it happened often enough.
That lab specialized in testing organs and tissues for donations, and the majority of our samples came from cadaver donors. A living human has scores of bacteria living on their skin, in their mouth, in their digestive tract. That’s normal. When the human body dies, those microbes continue to thrive for some time, and even with rigorous cleaning, we often had tissue samples positive for a variety of bugs. Some of these bugs can be dealt with easily, and depending on the client and what the tissue was meant for, the tissue could still be used, as long as the organism wasn’t considered objectionable.
The objectionable bugs are those that can cause serious disease in an immunocompromised individual (most recipients of transplants are on medications that suppress their immune systems, so this is can be a very real problem). Though we did have a number of those every day, there were still many tissue samples we tested that were free of any microbial growth. Working in that environment allowed me to learn about a whole host of organisms that were never covered in my college coursework, and some were far more interesting to work with than others.
When even some of the nastiest bugs that call the human body home become commonplace, it takes a very special sort to become the lab’s mascot.
We had an array of different sample types come into the lab. Many came in the form of swabs in test tubes (for tissue, tendons, ligaments, and small joints), while many others came in smallish jars (skin samples). Every once in a while, we’d get something out of the ordinary that would require a much larger container—a two-liter jar, for example. It was only natural that we found our mascot in one of the unusual samples.
The samples I’m referring to hold broth media. It’s specialized for microbial growth (both bacterial and fungal), and as the name suggests, it is a liquid. When bacteria or yeast find their way into liquid media, the cells grow and divide, and it leaves the sample looking cloudy or hazy. Further testing (staining, biochemical tests, or rapid sequencing) can lead you down the path to discovering the identity of the organism. Just looking at the sample, however, tells you nothing other than something’s growing inside.
The lab mascot needed to be immediately recognizable. Due to that requirement, bacteria and yeast were eliminated from the running. That left us only with one true candidate: Mold.
When a mold grows in broth media, it doesn’t leave the liquid cloudy or hazy. It forms puffy structures, not unlike the white tops of dandelion seeds. The surrounding liquid remains clear, and the little fluffs of mold growing inside appear delicate and almost graceful when they’re small. Once they become larger, they seem to take on stranger characteristics. Some species will coat the top of the media in a thick mat of fuzz, others will remain submersed, but will appear more solid.
The mascot we discovered was not only housed in one of those large containers, but it grew into a puffball of immense proportions. It was deemed worthy of the title “lab mascot” by our senior technologist, and lived happily on her desk for several weeks, on display for everyone in the lab to see. (She gave it a name, but at this point in time, I can’t recall what it was.)
Unfortunately, our mascot met its doom one Tuesday when auditors arrived, but in writing this, its silly legacy remains.
Thanks for reading my latest Tales from the Lab! If you’d like to read the previous posts in the series, you can find them here.