bio.display

Maarten de Smit came up with the wonderful idea that we could use microtiter plates as a canvas for drawing the images on GFP bacteria. These plates contain small ‘wells’ close to each other, so it’s easy to put a small amount of material in them – like the bacteria and their agar base. And we can conveniently treat each well as a single pixel, either dropping some arabinose on it so that it becomes fluorescent, or not.

The reason we can’t use one big plate of bacteria is that the arabinose dissipates in the agar, thus would spread around a large part of the plate. This is not desired when separate pixels need to be created beside each other.

We’ll grow some bacteria in these tomorrow, and try them out on Wednesday to see if they really work. Could have our first 12 x 8 = 96 pixel bacteria image as soon as Thursday!

(image courtesy of Jeffrey M. Vincour, originally published under CC-by)