• Question: Why does the room and all the materials have to be clean?

    Asked by megan to Tatiana, Natt on 20 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Natt Day

      Natt Day answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      Hi Megan,

      There’s three main reasons everything you use has to be clean:

      The first reason is to stop any cross-contamination. On a daily basis I can be doing work with bacteria (like E. coli) and I can also be doing work with human cells– and you don’t want accidentally get things mixed up as it can be dangerous and it will ruin your experiments.

      The second reason– that is especially relevant for us that use live viruses in experiments– is so that we don’t accidentally let the viruses out. The cold virus can live on surfaces for 3 hours. So imagine if I didn’t thoroughly clean everything! Probably lots of people in the lab would be accidentally catching colds off my equipment…

      The third reason is to make sure our experiments don’t get infected by microbes. Even though you can’t see them, there are loads of microscopic fungi/bacteria floating around in the air– and so if we don’t clean the labs and all our instruments thoroughly before using them– we may accidentally introduce the fungi/bacteria to our experiments and make our them grow spores which means we can’t use them anymore!

      Natt

    • Photo: Tatiana Trantidou

      Tatiana Trantidou answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hi Megan,

      for my experiments the room and all materials have to be clean for a different reason than Natt’s. In my lab, we build tiny structures on glass, which are so small you can’t even see them without a powerful microscope. We have to keep the room and all the materials free of dust and other particles, because all these are similar in size to our structures and they will mess up with them. For example, imagine that you have a tiny channel, smaller in width than a single hair. If a small piece of dust goes on top of this channel, it is already blocked.
      Walking around the room, talking or even breathing produces particles which will destroy the structures we build in the lab. This is why we have to wear overalls, masks, goggles and gloves and of course keep the room and our materials clean.

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