Painting with microbes

Parker Stone lab section F01

 

For my microbial art I attempted to draw a couple of people dancing in a style simlar to artist Keith Haring. For some reason only one of the figures really showed up, despite the fact that both were drawn with the same bacteria. I used the S. marcesens   on the MacConkey agar. MAC is a differntial and selective media that selects for Gram negative bacertia and allows one to determine weather a microbe is capable of fermenting lactose. A lactose fermenter would have turned the colonies  pink which would have looked a lot cooler probably. I’m not sure why I didn’t choose E. Coli for example. S. marcesens does not ferment lactose. Instead it grew on the peptone present in the media and produced much lighter colored colonies.

 

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