Bio 304 Unknown Report Guidelines Spring 2005

There is no page requirement for this report. If you are concise, it can be quite short. I’m looking for an understanding of the techniques used to identify the unknown organism. If your logic is good, but you misidentified your unknown, you will not be marked down. Similarly, if you get it right, but don’t have a clue why, you won’t get a good grade. It should NOT be a narrative (no ‘book reports’). It MUST take the following form of a scientific report with the 5 sections labeled:

Title

Introduction: Short; a sentence or two demonstrating your understanding of the big picture of this process. For example: “An attempt was made to identify the genus and species of a bacteriologic unknown. We applied the knowledge of morphologic, cultural, and metabolic characteristics of the unknown organism to classify it according to the laboratory manual and Bergy’s Manual of Determinative Bacteriology.”

Materials and methods/Results: Create overall steps in method and the results, an appropriately labeled data table would work, plus sufficient narrative to describe your understanding of the methods. For example: “After it was determined that the unknown was catalase positive, a mannitol fermentation tube was inoculated to determine if the unknown fermented mannitol as sole carbon source to acid and/or gas products.” The following results should be included:

Colony morphology

Cell morphology

Gram reaction

Catalase and/or Oxidase test result

All other biochemical test results

Discussion/conclusions: Describe identification step by step, can use flow charts. Discuss what additional tests might be done to definitively ID organism (Check in Bergy’s). If any problems were encountered, discuss what to do to address them.

References: Bergy’s, Johnson & Case

Other formatting notes…

Tables have a number and a title: for example…

Table 1. Summary of lunch choices of students in the cafeteria on Jan 3, 2001

Menu Item	Number of students
Pizza	53
Stir fry chicken	79
Caesar salad	42

Figures have a number and a legend:

Figure 1. Regional sales data from cotton candy distributors for FY 2004

Remember! When you are writing the genus and species name of a bacterium, it is italicized. It is also written out completely the first time, it can then be abbreviated after that. For example:

Escherichia coli / E. coli

Serratia marcesens / S. marcesens

Pseudomonas fluorescens / Ps. fluorescens