Bacteria as “ink” for writing the initials of names on agar
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Microbiology, Science and Medical Education
- Keywords
- surface patterning, violacein, Chromobacterium violaceum, swarming motility, solid medium, colour contrast, cell spreading, inoculation loop, pigment diffusivity, education research
- Copyright
- © 2016 Ng
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Bacteria as “ink” for writing the initials of names on agar. PeerJ Preprints 4:e349v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.349v3
Abstract
Mementos encapsulate memories and serve as triggers for their recollections. By using a purple pigment producing bacterium as “ink” for writing on agar, a picture memento depicting the initials of students’ names was created to help them remember the strong friendships fostered during their final year research projects. Besides the fun activity of “Bacterial calligraphy”, the surface patterning technique can also serve as a simple and relatively low cost tool for testing the feasibility of research ideas; for example, depositing cells in both straight and curvilinear lines on planar substrates for investigating possible interactions between different microorganism species. A synopsis of the work and a structured abstract can be found in the accompanying PDF file, while the original article, “Bacterial Calligraphy: A Memento for Undergraduate Research Students”, is available in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 172-174, as an open access article http://www.asmscience.org/content/journal/jmbe/10.1128/jmbe.v13i2.414
Author Comment
This version updates outdated links to the published paper.