“Teach me,” she said.

[Cecily]

I was driving at that. Extremely inefficient and borderline disrespectful use of my time, pretttty sure our manual / text doesn’t have a differential reference, but I have a much better idea of how the tests operate than I got while scrambling to go through the physical motions rushed in the lab. I gained a few points in research and found some sources I plan to come back to help with course and personal interest.

From the top of my head (and this is all “new” information acquired today I’ve long since forgotten about when I did it before) :

O-F tests how / if an organism metabolizes sugar, seeing if ferments glucose in the presence of oxygen or if oxygen is toxic to it. That’s alot of variables that I haven’t quite gotten my head around, and I think we’re basically we’re seeing how deep into the Krebs cycle something gets, oxygen needed for oxidative phosphorylation in aerobic respiration’s electron transport chain = most efficient use of glucose for ATP.

Hazy on krebs, but I think each turn gets you 30+ 2 or 4? some ATP. Earlier step of glycolysis is way less efficient, so I’d make the assumption that anaerobic organisms reproduce much slower simply due to less available energy than ones that can survive in O2. Need to ask if I’m right on that.

Triple sugar iron test I need to look into more because the results are complicated. There’s like 8 different variables, glucose fermentation or glucose AND sucrose and or frutose, and also if it reduces sulfur. There’s also an indicator for metabolism of animal proteins. There’s a reaction with acid from fermentation that turns into black percipitate when sulfwr reduction happens.

Phenol red broth, this is the only one I actually know the indicator for (hint: phenol red) and I need to fix that in the future, but this can be glucose/ sucrose/ frutose as a differential, I’m assuming. But what it does is change color to yellow from red if fermentation happens when the ph drops to 6.8 or lower from the acid. If some p word happens the solution the solution turns pink from the alkaline end products. There’s also a tube floating in the solution that gets a bubble in it if fermentation produces gas. That gives you 3 or 4 results, depending.

As far as what bacteria does what, that’s all white noise atm and I need to see how relevant knowing that is to my grade. I think the concepts and characteristics are the focus here. The big picture in this lab from what I can see is these are simply various ways to test for fermentation of carbohydrates with slightly different variables.