Tri-2, Wk13, Day 122 - Sleep, Strep & Staph

The sympathetic system of Poop & Relax (or Rest & Recup) took presidence today. I don't exactly recall falling asleep but I guess it was around 3 p.m. and that little nap lasted until about 9:30 p.m.

It looks like I wasn't the only one struggling with the neuro lab slides yesterday, some people spent up to 5 hours labeling things and nobody was able to finish. We all collaborated today to share information and bolster our slides by sharing.

Today was biochemistry, neuroanatomy lab & microbiology lab. We got to see the results of throat cultures taken earlier this week. YUCK! such nasty stuff - As Table 1 shows at www.TextBookofBacteriology.net, there are 24 commonly found bacteria on the surfaces of the human body. I believe we were looking to find staphylococcus aureus and streptococcus pneumoniae which is found in the throats of approximately 25% of the population. Having seen pictures of these little buggers and resulting wounds should these bacteria get into the body makes me want to buy massive quantities of Listerine.

Today's pictures - the one in red is the streptococcus pneumoniae, the one with brown little circles are the staphylococcus aureus (hey Mom - notice the letter 'o' in both those words?) ;)

hehehe

Yeah, it was mainly biochem today - two hours of the fascinating subject. I'm not recalling exactly what we did off hand so I'll need to refer to my notes which, is what I need to be doing if I can't recall anything (think I'm still waking up) :)

Ah, yes ...we learned about Purine and Pyrimidine synthesis which are both nitrogenous bases used to make nucleotide structures. Big or polynucleotide examples include DNA and RNA. Mononucleotide examples are ATP and GTP, Dinucleotides include NAD, NADH, FAD, FADH, etc.

We also covered the mineral Iron as well as some neurotransmitter synthesis.

I'd better get to studying - somewhere on the order of 10 test next week, basically two test per day, every day until the end of this semester. It's hard to know where to start.