Pretty much. It’s like a little wire loop - sterilize it with a bunsen burner, let it cool, then take a swab from your source specimen and drag it into your agar for that section 1. Sterilize it again with the burner, cool, then drag through the last couple lines of 1 to get region 2. Repeat for 3 and again for 4. The sample size of individual microbes gets exponentially fewer each time - done correctly and region 4 is dotted with individual cells, which you leave alone for a while to incubate, then come back and start making your observations like how it’s interacting with the agar, what color, texture etc; smear it onto a microscope slide, see how it responds to different stains, it’s shape, it’s arrangement… then start checking all those findings against known properties of different microbes until you find a match.
1 through to the end are all made with new, sterile… sticks?
Look ma, I’m a biochemist now!
Pretty much. It’s like a little wire loop - sterilize it with a bunsen burner, let it cool, then take a swab from your source specimen and drag it into your agar for that section 1. Sterilize it again with the burner, cool, then drag through the last couple lines of 1 to get region 2. Repeat for 3 and again for 4. The sample size of individual microbes gets exponentially fewer each time - done correctly and region 4 is dotted with individual cells, which you leave alone for a while to incubate, then come back and start making your observations like how it’s interacting with the agar, what color, texture etc; smear it onto a microscope slide, see how it responds to different stains, it’s shape, it’s arrangement… then start checking all those findings against known properties of different microbes until you find a match.