How awesome is this - bacterial art. I got it as an attachment so I can't credit the original. What you're seeing is the same E. coli species with different plasmids expressing different variants of GFP (probably). GFP is a natural fluorescent protein that was originally isolated from jellyfish. Anyway, the people in the lab streaked the different E. coli cultures, let them grow overnight and then exposed the petri dish to UV light to make the fluorescent proteins ....well, fluoresce. In the lab I'm working with a few types of GFP proteins but not enough to make this artwork. And who says scientists aren't artistic!
1 comment:
Now that is beautiful. ^_^ I remember doing that back in Guelph, actually! We only had one variant of GFP to work with though, and at that point in the game we were happy we got our E. coli to glow at all. Heh. I love it!
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