Monthly Archives: August 2015

“Smelling of roses”

Future of Microbiology,

P-aeruginosa_pigment

Blindfold any bacteriology scientist and ask them to smell agar plates containing Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus anginosus respectively. Chances are they will give you the ID in a flash.

I am not suggesting you do this however! We would never smell plates for Health and Safety reasons, but sometimes it is difficult not to get a whiff in passing….

Along the same lines think about how a Moraxella catarrhalis moves over the surface of the agar when you give it a prod with a loop. Think about how a Eikenella corrodens buries itself into the agar…

Why am I telling you all this?

In a few months time my lab will be getting a Kiestra TLA system where the plates will no longer be hand held for visual inspection, but digitally imaged for viewing on a screen. No longer will the scientists be able (routinely) to smell the plates or move the colonies about with a plastic loop.

Some might say that this is a disadvantage when it comes to recognising bacteria. Maybe, but I believe the other advantages of moving to this sort of system far outweigh losing the ability to touch and smell the bacteria.

And if you really wanted to, you could ask the Kiestra to “call” the plates to your workbench so you can use “other senses” apart from your eyesight. I suspect this might happen quite a lot to start off with, and then become less and less common as staff gain confidence in the system.

And maybe in 20 yrs time, when everybody, everywhere, has TLA systems, we will all forget what a Pseudomonas or a Haemophilus smells like, but I doubt it….

Michael

“Repetitive task Syndrome”

Confessions of a Microbiologist, ,

You have probably heard a lot about “Repetitive Strain Injury” (RSI), but what about “Repetitive Task Syndrome” ?

In the setting of the microbiology laboratory we often need to carry out tasks that are highly repetitive, whether it is plating out samples, reading cultures, reading Gram stains, performing EIAs/PCRs, signing out results etc etc.

So what might the symptoms be of such a syndrome? An excessive amount of repetition might lead to boredom, low morale, depression, or introversion. It might also suppress innovative thinking.

In contrast to repetitive strain injury, where symptoms are physical and come on over days to weeks, with repetitive task syndrome the effects are potentially more psychological and their effects are more likely to appear over months, even years.

I am only speculating here but I suspect that such a syndrome exists. It just hasn’t been given a name yet….

However there is light at the end of the tunnel! Bacteriology automation systems with associated interpretative software should eventually see an end to a lot of the manual repetition that currently occurs in microbiology laboratories, leaving only the interesting, odd and unusual for manual input, and ensuring much more variety during the average working day.

Until then I think we need to ensure that we as microbiologists do not perform repetitive tasks for prolonged periods, just in case my theory of “Repetitive Task Syndrome” turns out to be true……

I also have a mantra that states that for any task which is done repetitively by someone, there is probably a better, different, or easier way of doing it..

Michael