A tragic accident has occurred in your research lab; one of your two grad studen

Question

A tragic accident has occurred in your research lab; one of your two grad students has died due to massive butyrate poisoning. You immediately launch an investigation and find that someone has accidently stored your aerobic, halophilc psychrophile prokaryote in the lab food fridge as opposed to the cell culture fridge.
The only food items found in the fridge is a jar of dill pickles, an apple pie, a pitcher of orange juice and 2 forks (one long, one short). What food item would you suspect was contaminated with your prokaryote?

How would you confirm this?

Assuming both graduate students shared the food during a late night meal together what is your explanation regarding the metabolic pathways of your prokaryote and how your bacteria killed the grad student and why is the second grad student still alive?

Kind of confused. any insight? Thanks.

Explanation / Answer

First, to find the type of food that was contaminated, break down the words describing the organism: Aerobic: needs oxygen to survive Halophilic: "salt-loving" Psychrophile: can grow at cold temperatures From these descriptions, what food item did it most likely grow in? The highly acidic orange juice, the sugary pie, or the dills that were likely pickled in a salt-solution? :) You could then confirm by collecting a sample in a petri dish. As for the metabolic pathway, consider that the students had butyrate poisoning. Is there any pathway that would form the compound in the process of making ATP? Now think of how the second student is alive. Could the poisoning have affected a different part of his body, or could the order in which he ate the foods have helped?

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