Thomasville High Scholars Academy students Caliyah Sinkfield and Carly House are inserting a plasmid (piece of DNA) into bacteria in a pGLO Bacterial Transformation lab in Jamie Gammel’s Advanced Placement Biology class. The plasmid has a gene that makes the bacteria resistant to an antibiotic and a gene that allows it to fluoresce in UV light. The bacteria, by the way, is genetically engineered so it is not pathogenic and cannot grow outside of a lab!
Meta Ughetto and Sara Strickland “streak” their bacteria cells, a technique used to isolate a pure strain from a single species of microorganism, often bacteria. Samples can then be taken from the resulting colonies and a microbiological culture can be grown on a new plate so that the organism can be identified, studied, or tested.