Question: what area in science do you focus on ?

Monica Flaherty answered on 14 Nov 2016:

I work in a Microbiology Laboratory in a hospital so I focus on bacteria, fungi and viruses which cause infections in the human body. I also determine which antibiotics or antifungals should be used to treat the infection. When a patient presents to a doctor with an infection example, wound infection, chest infection, ear infection, gastrointestinal infection or urinary tract infection, the doctor usually takes a specimen. For a wound infection they would take a swab, chest infection-they would ask a patient to cough up sputum, gastrointestinal infection-stool sample, urinary tract infection-urine. These specimens are then sent to our laboratory. We label each sample so we can keep track of it being processed. We receive hundreds of specimens each day. Each specimen is placed on agar plates(there is different agar plates for different samples) and these plates are incubated at ususally 35OC over night. Some are incubated in air, some in an atmosphere of CO2 and some in an anaerobic atmosphere. Some are incubated for more than 24 hours( this is because some bacteria are slow growing). After the appropriate incubation time, the plates are taken out and we read the plates looking for significant bacteria. Every species of bacteria can look different. We identify the bacteria using numerous methods, e.g which carbohydrates they utilise, looking to see if they possess different enzymes( Staphylococcus aureus has an enzyme called coagulase). In the last few years laboratories have started using mass spectrometry, this has speeded up the whole process of identifying bacteria in the laboratory.