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After I decided on antibiotics for my project, I did some more research and chose a classic
medicine that you have probably all heard of before: Penicillin. I found out that it
grows as a bluish greenish whitish mold and found this website: survival monkey.com. Right
here, that has really good instructions on how to grow it and keep it alive and use.
What is penicillin, anyway? Penicillin is a blue green mold commonly found on fruits
like cantaloupe and peaches and bagels. It looks like a brush under a microscope and
it was named Penicillin after the latin word for paintbrush. It is worth mentioning that
the name pencil was also derived from the latin word. It was supposedly discovered by
a man named Alexander Fleming but people hundreds of years before that have been using it Penicillin.
It was the first antibiotic and has saved millions of lives. So how does it work? Bacteria
are always rebuilding their cell walls; it's their only line of defense bacteria will die
without their cell walls, so penicillins penetrate and destroy the wall leaving the harmful bacteria
exposed and thus killing them. To help you understand, take this analogy; penicillins
are to bacteria as *** is to our immune system. *** is a virus that kills a special cell called
the T-cell the T-cell is vital to the immune system and without it, there is no defense
so basically *** is stripping our bodies of our defenses like penicillins do to bacteria.
So there it is. Now I'm going to begin cutting up the cantaloupe for the mold to grow on.
I scoop out the seeds and chop it into smaller and smaller pieces. I place those pieces inside
a small glass container. I take a small piece of bagel that already has mold growing on
it and place it in with the cantaloupe to inoculate it. I then take it downstairs into
a warm, dark, place. It has been two days since we set up the culture and time to check
on our mold. As you can see the cantaloupe seems to have grown nothing but the bagel
has been completely covered. The other bagel too has been covered in mold. That is interesting.
So I haven't checked