Since the human took Shepard off to a biotech (actually, it's for design automation in synthetic biology. Big words, I know.) conference last week, I took the time to get settled in the lab and start engineering some bacteria of my very own. Nothing too hard, just your normal glow-in-the-dark bacteria with jellyfish fluorescent proteins.
The rest of this is going to read like the protocols section from a science journal paper. It's what I get for letting the human proofread.
For 'bacteria' (trust me, you do not actually want to be growing lab strain E. coli in your kitchen. Or basement laboratory. They smell.), we used some glow-in-the-dark fabric paint, and very carefully streaked the plates. Alas, we did not have red paint for RFP, so no flow cytometry for us.
Biology lesson of the day: 'Streaking plates' is how you get a single colony of bacteria that's all descended from one cell. You start by growing up some bacteria in liquid culture, and then spreading that out on a plate. You dip a sterilized loop in the liquid, and zig-zag across about a quarter of the plate. Then you sterilize the loop again, and starting at where your previous zig-zags ended, zig-zag across another section of the plate. And you do this until you fill the plate. At the very last zig-zags, you'll have spread out the bacteria enough that you'll only have single cells. Then you grow them up overnight and voila, colonies!
We have a whole 9 plates of 'bacteria', three green, three yellow, and three blue. They may or may not be adorable, depending on your sensibilities when it comes to genetically modified organisms.
If you're interested in a set of petri dishes for your very own, please contact the human at jinjia.mixed.goods@gmail.com. We have a set of 9 petri dishes (3 empty, 3 plain agar, and 3 with bacteria) ready to ship to any miniature lab in the US. The price (including all fees and shipping) is $30. If there's demand, we can take custom orders for more.
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