Bacterial
contamination levels on various surfaces in our daily life
University of Rochester
Materials Science in Mechanical Engineering Department
507 SEM PRACTICUM
Yan Li
HOME INTRODUCTION SAMPLE PREPARATION
RESULTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & COLORIZATION
INTRODUCTION:
The world around us
is not as
clean as we considered it should be. Believe it or not, bacteria are
everywhere
and contaminate “our clean world”. The bacteria are a large
group of
unicellular, prokaryote, microorganisms. They are ubiquitous in every
habitat
on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste,
water, and deep in the
Earth's crust, as well as in organic matter and the live bodies of
plants and
animals. There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of
soil and a
million bacterial cells in a milliliter of fresh water; in all, there
are
approximately five nonillion (5×1030) bacteria on
Earth, forming
much of the world's biomass. It is meaningful to know about these
bacteria
living in our daily life. And this project will investigate on the
bacterial
contamination levels on the surfaces we contact frequently in our daily
life. I will select the surfaces that are
most
related with us. They are including the keyboard of public computers,
the teeth brush, the knot of the door, the desks in the library, etc. After the project, we will get a general idea
about how “dirty” the surroundings around us.