How Would Mr. Wizard Make A Pitri Dish Lab?
You can find recipes for bacterial growth media on the internet and buy the glass ware (petri plates, flasks or test tubes), a pressure cooker can be used to sterilize the equipment and contaminated media. There are two basic experimental setups you can use. The first involves spreading dilute bacterial culture evenly over the surface of a plate and placing paper circles that have been soaked in the substance you want to test on the surface. If the bacteria are killed by the substance you will see a clear zone around the paper. The second setup uses liquid media and serial dilutions of the substance to be tested (1mg/ml, 100ug/ml, 10ug/ml, 1ug/ml etc). You inoculate a tube of just media, the dilutions of the substance and have one uninoculated tube as a reference. The lowest dilution which doesn’t show any growth (as measured by turbidity) after 24 hours is the minimum inhibitory concentration MIC of the substance. Before you begin there are a several of problems. You need to isolate a
If you don’t know basic lab safety, you shouldn’t be culturing anything, much less bacterial infections–you could easily wipe out your whole family in a matter of days. If I were you, I’d take classes at a community college and learn biochemistry and lab techniques from the ground up. Not to mention the fact that if you live in Indonesia and try to do any of this outside the system, you’re likely to get on every bioterrorism watch list from here to kingdom come. That said, the best resource on biological experiments I know is a British grad student posting under the name of “Megalomania” at the Rogue Science Explosives and Weapons forum. Scroll down to their “Chemistry for Amateur Experimenters and Citizen Scientists.” Lots of great resources if you don’t mind the company of people who make nerve gas for fun.
What colophon said, plus sterilization, sterilization, sterilization! It’s hard enough to isolate a specific species, prove it is what you say it is, prove it’s involved in whatever illness/condition you’re interested in, and then go about conducting studies on it in a controlled environment with modern lab equipment. Failure to properly sterilize everything in a bacteria lab is grounds to throw out a whole study, good luck replicating those same conditions in a tent or apartment without a bio safety hood. You can actually come pretty darn close to bacteria growth medium using commonly available ingredients, but getting the solutions right is going to be tricky. That’s why microbiologists don’t spend days producing media from raw products and instead just order a dry mix from a company like Fisher or Sigma Aldrich, add water, and sterilize it.
If you’re just trying to test the general antibiotic properties of various substances, you do not want to culture a “bacterial infection.” Non-disease-causing bacteria (like the strains of E. coli most frequently used in labs) die just as well as their infectious counterparts. colophon is 100% right: working with infectious bacteria – particularly in a non-lab setting! – could be dangerous to yourself and anyone you come in contact with, and is probably considered illegal. If you don’t have a way to be sure of what strains you’re working with (and isolating bacterial strains is hard!), any bacteria you’re growing might be dangerous. If you want to gather actual data, consider asking local schools, universities, hospitals, labs, etc. for help. Though they may rarer, or more strapped for resources, these institutions still exist in third-world countries – particularly if you’re somewhere where you’ve got access to the internet! If you’re interested in doing this out of personal curiousit
