Quotes About Agar

The species that prosper on agar represent less than 0.5 percent of the life in the soil; most microbes have thirsts that we have failed to slake in the laboratory.

If a sample of soil is diluted, mixed with bacteria, and spread on agar, the phages will dot the culture with plaques after 24 hours of incubation. These plaques may be initiated by more than one phage, and the students engage in further rounds of isolation and bacterial infection to ensure that they have purified single phages. After many more steps in this lengthy procedure, the students purify and sequence the phage DNA, and can submit their sequences to an online database.