What does "selecting a colony of bacteria" mean?

when you itiallly make a culture of bacteria you will get a swab from somewhere eg bench and swab thet over the agar plate and see what grows.


After a time period those bacteria that can grow at whatever temp you put them eg at 25oC will grow....what has generally started those colonies is individual or a small number of bacteria....so your resulting plate will be littered with maybe hundreds of little blobs/circles which are bacteria colonies (mainly of the same bacterium)...there will be colonies that overlap so we generally chose bacteria in single isolated colonies to ensure you get the most "pure" or the same type of bacteria to chose to sub-culturing.


Sub culturing is used for experiements where you only want 1 type of bacteria (to limit the variables in an experiment eg antiseptic resistance.

What does "selecting a colony of bacteria" mean?
I'm going to say that you are doing a project gram stain test on bacteria. Therefore you must grow bacteria in a petri dish which results in different colonys which are just the bacteria that is the same together, usually the bacteria will separte itself into the own colonies so selecting the colony is just picking the different bacteria for the tests.
Reply:Selecting a colony of bacteria means selecting a culture of bacteria in a petri-dish / plate.





It means selecting cultured bacteria.
Reply:the term 'selecting' can refer to a couple different things here. It might be the same as "picking a clone" which would be using a loop or a needle to take a sample of a single bacterial colony from a culture plate.


Alternatively, it might refer to the method of spreading a bacterial culture onto a selective plate (an agar plate that contains some selective agent such as an antibiotic). Bacteria that contain a resistance gene to the particular selective agent would grow into a colony, while non-resistant bacteria would die.