“If you try to watch bacteria grow in tissues or in soils, those are opaque, and you can’t actually see what the colony is doing. This was a result of practical limits rather than a lack of curiosity. “Ever since bacteria were discovered over 300 years ago, most lab research has studied them in test tubes or on Petri dishes,” said Sujit Datta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton and the study’s senior author. They discovered that when the bacteria grow, their colonies consistently form fascinating rough shapes that resemble a branching head of broccoli, far more complex than what is seen in a Petri dish. This knowledge could be important for advancing environmental and medical research.Ī Princeton University team has now developed a method for observing bacteria in 3-D environments. Credit: Neil Adelantar/Princeton University Researchers found that bacteria colonies form in three dimensions in rough shapes similar to crystals.īacterial colonies often grow in streaks on Petri dishes in laboratories, but no one has understood how the colonies arrange themselves in more realistic three-dimensional (3-D) environments, such as tissues and gels in human bodies or soils and sediments in the environment, until now. The researchers were able to observe bacterial colonies’ clumpy growth in three dimensions.
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