Bacteria, thousands of them. Happily going about their flagellated lives, dividing, forming little growths on the new paradise they've found on the bountiful petri dish but all the time....being watched.
For the next few weeks in the lab, a strain of paired cocci-like, motile bacteria that I isolated from a spider web in honour of Larry the Existentialist will be put through a series of delightfully invasive testing. For now the unknowing millions are simply growing in LB medium and, like and Hänsel and Gretel before them, are getting all fed up before being fed into various biochemical broths of evil and woe.
This is the first project based lab work I've encountered so far and so far my sadism towards prokaryotes is more than satisfied. No, seriously, I love the critters - bags of proteomic joy they are - filling up every environmental niche out there with life and replication. It's thanks to them ecologists can produce pages of unsterile publications doomed to the compost heap of cellulose based literature.
What joy, what joy...
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