Earth is completely covered by many forms of bacteria. Door handles, water fountains, ice… Earth is completely covered by many forms of bacteria. Door handles, water fountains, ice trays and the floor – nothing can hide from these unicellular organisms.

The Pitt News implemented a case study on the In the Groove 2: Pump It Up machine in the William Pitt Union. This machine is constantly crowded with students who follow a rhythmic dance routine to a wide range of song choices, sometimes for a few hours at a time.

In The Groove 2, which is in the vein of the popular Dance Dance Revolution game, provides a healthy outlet for many students on campus.

“DDR brings a sense of community. It is something we all do together,” player Rocky Radebaugh said.

With all the play this machine and the amount of traffic at other University locations, the machine and other locations could contain harmful bacteria.

To find out the bacteria content of these locations, The Pitt News conducted a case study to correctly diagnose the cleanliness of the ITG machine on campus with the assistance of the Microbiology Lab Coordinator Melanie Popa and the Microbiology Lab Manager David Hornack.

For this test, a swab sample was taken on seven various areas on the ITG machine and from around campus. These samples were then streaked onto a petri dish, set at room temperature (between 23 and 27 degrees Celsius) and left to grow for two days.

In order to fairly test the bacteria content on the ITG machine, other ordinary objects were also tested to compare results. These various objects included a door handle at the entrance of Holland Hall North, the floor next to the elevators on the lower floor of the WPU and behind the very cooperative Popa’s ear.

On the ITG machine, the Start button, a blue floor arrow and a handle bar were all swabbed.

After the two-day waiting period, the dishes were reexamined. A procedure called colony morphology was performed on the samples. Colony morphology is the simplest way to evaluate a sample’s overall concentration, color, spread and deviation (resembles a volcano shape on the plate), with the naked eye.

Under colony morphology, the results were quite obvious. “All of the bacteria,” Popa said, “are all very common types of bacterial colonies.”

The ITG machine did have a large amount of bacteria cultured; however, it was almost identical to the sample taken from the floor.

“The floor samples show the most bacteria because of the soil bacteria brought in on shoes from outside,” Popa continued.

According to Radebaugh, students do not dance barefoot.

“If you play barefoot, then you’ll bleed everywhere because of the floor rivets, which just isn’t sanitary,” Radebaugh said.

The bacteria results agree with Radebaugh’s statement, since no noticeable skin bacteria was on the petri dish when compared to Popa’s skin sample. Popa agrees with the notion that most people do not play barefoot, but it is hard to tell for sure since “skin bacteria normally stay firmly on the foot,” she said.

Among all the samples, skin and soil bacteria, mold and possibly some yeast cells were found. The cleanest objects were the Start button, the ITG handle bar and the door handle.

“Clean spots where the hands go and dirty spots where the feet go,” Popa summed up.

A further testing called cell morphology can be done on the samples. This procedure would classify the bacteria’s shape, or morphology, into one of four categories: bacillus (rod-shaped), coccus (spherical), spirillum (helical) and vibrio (curved rod).

This is done by isolating each bacterium and running further sequencing tests to determine a bacterium’s name and shape.