Bacteria as “ink” for writing the initials of names on agar
Mementos encapsulate memories and serve as triggers for their recollections. By using a purple pigment producing bacterium as “ink” for writing on agar, a picture memento depicting the initials of students’ names was created, to help them remember the strong friendships that they had fostered with their fellow course-mates during their final year research projects. Besides the fun activity of “Bacterial Calligraphy,” the surface patterning technique can also serve as a simple and relatively low-cost tool for testing the feasibility of research ideas; for example, depositing cells in both straight and curvilinear lines on planar substrates for investigating possible interactions between different microbial species. A synopsis of the work and a structured abstract can be found in the accompanying PDF file, while the original article, “Bacterial Calligraphy: A Memento for Undergraduate Research Students,” has been published in the Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 172-174, and is available at http://jmbe.asm.org/index.php/jmbe/article/view/414 as an open-access article.