bio.display

Last Friday we took some bacteria from plates that were about a month old, but were stored in the cold room. These were bacteria that had the pGLO plasmid in them, and thus being brightly fluorescent. To our luck, they were still living dandily on the agar gel they were on – thanks to the cold they were slowed down considerably.

Besides wanting to re-grow them, we also did a simple experiment seeing how the level of arabinose around the bacteria effects the level of fluorescense. It seems that neither too much or too little helps the cause – a concentration of 1 μg/ml gave the best results, with both 0.2 μg/ml and 5 μg/ml giving worse results on visual inspection.

But they do have an effect nevertheless, so we’d actually be able to create gray-scale images using this approach.