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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 21st, 2023

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  • My favourite magic box is the MALDI. Matrix Assisted Lazer Desorption Ionizer. You mix matrix with bacteria from culture on a slide. The machine fires a lazer at the slide and breaks it into ions (charged particles). They’re sucked up into a tube that measures mass/charge ratio by seeing how long it takes those particles to travel down a tube before they hit a detector (its mass spectrometry/time of flight). The signal it makes generates a fingerprint that is compared to a database… and it tells you exactly what bacteria you’ve isolated based on those fingerprints! Its the greatest invention known to man!