E. Colo Cell Lab Report

Colonial growth is the key to discovering whether there was a successful transformation in the bacterium 's cells. If there is colonial growth of E. coli in an ampicillin environment then the plasmids triumphantly transformed the cell and as a result were able to create either the enzyme beta-lactamase, for the pUC18 transformed cells, or the enzyme luciferase, for the lux transformed cells, which would counteract the effect of ampicillin on the cell wall of the bacteria. There were many errors in this experiment. Only two of the agar plates actually developed properly, one of them was the ampicillin agar plate with no plasmid (Fig 1: top left) because there was no growth seen. This was the expected result because since ampicillin kills the bacteria, the E. coli cells should not have been able to survive in the environment …show more content…
For the other agar plates, here is what should have been seen: the agar plate containing the pUC18 plasmid (Fig 2: top left) should have had similar results to the agar plate containing the lux plasmid (Fig 2: middle right), meaning there should have been both lawn and colonial growth, minus the chance of bioluminescence. When in reality, the agar plates taken from the experiment did reveal colonial growth but for the wrong reason. The growth seen in this agar plate (Fig 2: top left) was of another type of bacteria, possibly airborne bacteria that could have fallen onto the agar gel while the experiment was conducted. A possible explanation for why there was no growth of the bacterium E. coli could have been that the cell spreader could have been so hot that it killed all of the E. coli cells placed onto the agar gel and destroyed any chance of growth for this particular