Profile

My job is to develop culture media, which is made of agar (derived from seaweed and like jelly) and lots of other things including sugar that help bacteria grow. We make culture media so that it grows only certain bacteria that cause illness, such as the superbug MRSA that causes nasty infections. Microbiologists use our products to find out what’s making patients ill, so that doctors can give the right treatment.

Lots of different things go into making culture media so that only bacteria that cause disease grow – they can also be coloured using enzyme substrates. Making culture media is a bit like baking a cake – you just have to modify the recipe a lot to get the desired result ! Here’s what an agar plate with bacteria growing on it looks like:

The products I develop are used to help make patients better, quicker, which ultimately saves people’s lives (which is pretty cool, eh?). At the moment I’m working on making a product which detects bacteria that cause food poisoning, so that it doesn’t end up in a supermarket making people sick.

When I get into work, most days I’ll spend an hour or so at my computer researching and planning experiments. These experiments generally begin with making agar that I’ll later test. When developing agar for detecting bacteria that cause food poisoning, I test food such as chocolate and spinach. After a night in the incubator, this food can be seriously stinky and something that was a nice salmon fillet is now something a stray cat would decline – this can be my typical face opening an incubator first thing in the morning……

Luckily you get used to the smell!

Other than doing lab work, I also spend some of my time generating content for our Facebook and Twitter pages, and also blogging; our scientists love blogging and this is how we sometimes share ideas.