This is it, the big moment… The results for my personal Microbiology project came back! I have been thinking about my project for quite sometime. I was not sure what I had to do or how in depth the project was supposed to be. The research process was excruciating. I thought I was going to isolate one thing, then I thought about doing something else, and I just could not find what I wanted to do. One night I spent four hours just researching possible projects, and did not find anything that piqued my interest.
So I decided that I needed to come up with something of my own, so I thought about what I liked about microbiology and I decided to look at the bacterial community profile of groundhogs and southern flying squirrels. For those of you who do not know what these are, here you go (in order, no less):
Aren’t they cute? These two species are native to this area of the U.S. and I chose them due to their difference in diet, which would probably cause the gut microbial biome to be different from one another. The Groundhog is an herbivore, which means that it only eats plant-based food items. While the Southern flying squirrels are omnivores, like us (kind of), because they eat plant based items and insects. We eat plant based items and meat usually, but being an omnivore does not necessarily mean that you eat meat, just another form of food other than having just a plant-based diet. Anyway, like I said before, this difference in eating habits can cause the bacterial communities within their digestive systems to differ.
Oh, and by the way, we have bacteria and other microbes living in us as well. In fact, we need them to live, otherwise we would not be able to digest anything at all. No meat, no plant matter, etc. we are able to digest all of these things due to the little “bugs” (microbes) in our digestive systems.If we did not have this relationship with microbes, the only thing that we could ingest and extract nutrients from is Gatorade (fun fact)! This little tangent was to inform you about microbial communities and how they affect literally, everything.
However, back to my story. I extracted the DNA from the bacterial community of the two organisms’ digestive systems and compared them to one another. And guess what I found? There was a difference between the two organisms’ bacterial communities! I was beyond excited, I was running around the biology department telling everyone that my project worked. It was the best feeling ever! I have never been so excited! I cannot wait until my senior research comes back with similar results, hopefully… I digress, thank you for listening to my rant about science and I hope it was interesting!
Be safe and have fun!
-Kathyl
P.S. This was me… the mad scientist who loves cats.