How come bacteria can grow so massive in a petri dish but doesn’t in a normal enviroment?
In: Biology
The petri dish is like the Good Place for bacteria, all nice and warm and pleasant. The real world is like the Thunderdome for bacteria, desolate and bleak, with Tina Turner rocking some epic head gear.
Normal environments are never ideal. Bacteria are constantly being killed by a whole slew of things in the real world. Starvation, dehydration, temperature, light, other bacteria, viruses, fluctuating Ph, etc, etc.
The Petri is a nursery with plenty of food and much less competition for survival.
They don’t grow massive. Each blob is called a ‘colony forming unit’ and it’s made up of thousands of bacteria that each grew from one, or a small cluster.
Petri dishes have different mixtures of mediums that bacteria like.
Say your trying to grow one particular bacteria from a random mixture . You plate it on something they like with a specific technique and you incubate it at their preferred temperature. If it’s something that causes disease in humans then you incubate it at 37C and mimic the similar conditions that humans have.
If I want something that grows well in salty environments then I would use an agar that is salty. This will inhibit other bacteria that doesn’t like salt.
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