(working with) life ain’t easy

Nothing turned fluorescent for today either. Now the most probably cause is that the bacteria mutated somewhat, so that either it’s not procuding the fluorescent proteins at should, or the produced proteins are not fluorescent.

So we took the deep frozen (-70 °C) bacteria again, and are growing them out as a liquid culture to see. Some are grown with arabinose, so they should glow right away – to show that they are capable of doing so. As a control, I’m also growing some of the same bacteria that was used until now, from the same plate, with arabinose as a liquid culture, to see that indeed it just doesn’t turn fluorescent.

Unfortunately this means that the the original plan of a 256×192 pixel (16×12 plate, 2m x 1.4m) image cannot be realized until the exhibition opening. It might be that nothing can be realized until then. The best that can be done, if the newly grown bacteria works, is to make plates tomorrow, print them on Friday, and then see if they are OK on Saturday.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.