Silkworm Rap

So I had this great post planned about the Boston aquapocalypse but by the time I managed to get some water samples to the lab they had started heavily chlorinating the water and no bacteria were left! Since negative results don't make for good blog posts, please enjoy this video of my silkworms dancing to Flo Rida's Right Round instead.

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Of all the questions I have, I will simply ask this one:

Have you allowed the silk worms to crawl across an LB or BHI plate? It may make life easier if down the road you get some contamination and wonder where it came from :p

Haha! I'm going to try that right now, check back for results tomorrow!

I am very ashamed as a microbiologist to tell this story.

The bacteria I was working with would pretty quickly lose viability at 4C, so I would streak new plates every friday and keep them in a tupperware container at room temp for use during the next week.

One day I noticed my stock plates were looking kind of contaminated. They had what appeared to be streaks of bacteria that were independent of, but some times crossed, the actual streak marks from the loop I used when I inoculated the plates. 3 of the 4 plates looked like this, the 4th had some gaps in my streaks.

Closer examination revealed a few tiny alien monster larva things were migrating across my plates. How they got in a sealed tupperware container and then into a closed petri dish, and then out of the closed dish and into another one, I do not know.

The streaks of bacteria were whatever the scary alien bugs had brought with them into my plates, and the plate that didn't have contaminating bacteria was the only one with an antibiotic in it.

I blame the plate biologists who we share a lab with and their dirty dirty plants.

Hilarious.
I used that lightning effect in premiere (to start)
but the glow seemed like final cut pro.
Am I right?
Anyway groovy video.

Good guess! The lightning effect is from iMovie HD, the glow and the rest of the editing is in Final Cut Express.

Ah nice!
Sometimes I do effects in Premiere.. export as a quicktime movie and input into iMovie.. or vice versa.
These I use something like Adobe Soundboard to edit the audio - I loveeee editing the audio. The hard part is then matching it with the video after your done. But if it's good audio you get goosebumps.

I'm still an undergrad so I did a german video, and used photoshop to cut in characters without mouths, then put them into Final Cut and moved the mouth images with the music to make it look like the characters were talking.

Keep at your videos. There is nothing like science and video.

I'd give u an emmy for the worm on the trophy horse