Week 5 - Xieyue Xiao

We made some real progress this week! Among the 9 patient stool samples we processed early this week, I have verified that three of them have Pseudomonas aeruginosa and have isolated P. aeruginosa strains from them. More interestingly, from the morphologies of the colonies, they are very different. One isolate has a beautiful metal texture on the surface of the colony as shown in the picture below. 

In the following weeks, we will continue processing more samples. If we have more time after finishing the Leukemia patient samples, we want to process more BMT patient samples as a comparison. For the isolates we already got, we scheduled to do a MALDI identification early next week to finally confirm our conclusion. For one of the isolates, we also have the P. aeruginosa isolated from the blood sample from the same patients. That is to say, the patient had bacteremia caused by P. aeruginosa while he/she was colonized by P. aeruginosa in the gut, which is a great case for my project!

This Tuesday, I also attended the weekly case study presented by ID fellows. The first case is about a woman who got fungi infections from the subway booth she works in and it is very interesting!