12 Overview and Goals
Preparing Biolog Growth Plates
Your bacterial isolate has been grown on BUG agar plates. You practiced pipetting. Now, let’s learn about how your organism grows! What nutrients help your bacterium grow? We will use plates with ninety-six wells with different conditions to examine the growth and metabolic capacity of your isolate. For this, we will use special Biolog plates and your Blood Universal Growth (BUG) media containing plates with your organism. Biolog plates allow researchers to test and visually (colorimetrically!) analyze the growth of bacteria in numerous conditions… up to 30 conditions in one plate! Biolog plates work by having powder chemicals in the wells along with an inoculating fluid and a dye that changes color when an organism is growing (“metabolic dye”).
After completing this lab, you will gain the following lab skills:
Learning Objectives
- Lab safety and proper personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Proper use of Biolog plates and multichannel pipettors
- Proper use of a turbidimeter to adjust bacterial densities
- Analysis of growth data of bacteria in 96-well plates
Use the Protocols.io copy of the procedure accessed here to run and check off each step of the procedure.
