On these plates a swab from a iPhone screen is sampled. The CMA media (left) shows way more growth than the PDA plate (right). However, I am not sure if what I see are fungal colonies or mostly just bacteria. I want to believe it is mostly bacteria because the most abundant colonies on both types of media are yellow and orange. And I think the bright coloured ones mostly represent bacteria, but again I am not sure. Also, the PDA plate doesn’t have any growth of dark/black coloured colonies but the CMA plate does. The PDA plate only shows two types of colonies and that even in low numbers compared to CMA (yellow and orange). Whereas, the CMA plate shows black, white and pink colonies along with yellow and orange colonies. Therefore, I think the CMA media is better for this sample because it allows growth of more/different types of colonies (whether it being fungus or bacteria in this case – not sure if all the bright coloured ones are bacteria though) and the amount of colonies are greater in number on the CMA plate (which indicates the growth rate is higher on the CMA plate for this sample).
