How well do you know your bacteria?

Submitted by Sandra Porter on 1 January, 2009.
Filed Under
Science Blog

The other day, one of my commentors wrote that "a well-informed sixth-grader should be able to distinguish MRSA from E. coli".

Well, here's a nutrient agar plate with some of the bacteria that we isolated from a local creek last fall. We identified our bacteria by sequencing the 16S ribosomal DNA, but for various reasons, that I won't go into here, we don't know which sequences belong to which colonies.

i-baa7f5842895316e8e0aa50f7b4ae8c8-creek_bacteria.jpg
Figure 1. Bacteria isolated from a local creek.
 

I guess we need some well-informed sixth graders. ;-)