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Bacterial Growth Curves: Experiment with bacterial growth Virtual Lab

Learn about the mind-boggling speed of exponential growth and test how different growth conditions affect bacterial growth.

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Bacterial Growth Curves: Experiment with bacterial growth

About this Simulation

From a single cell to billions of bacteria in just a few hours…

In this simulation, you will experiment with bacterial growth and test the impact of different factors on bacterial growth. Will you be able to plot the bacterial growth and determine the different growth phases?

Find new antibiotics

This simulation is the sequel to the Bacterial Quantification by Culture simulation. In this simulation, your friend just came back from an expedition in the Amazon rainforest. One of her samples contains a fungi that seems to kill bacteria cells. Your goal is to determine if the fungal compound is effective in reducing the bacterial growth. If your experiment is successful, your findings might be used to create a novel drug that has the potential to save lives!

Plot bacterial growth curves

Your first task is to grow E. coli with the fungal compound and plot the bacterial growth. Your job is to determine the different phases of bacterial growth. This simulation allows you to experiment freely and set up your own experiment to determine the effect of temperature on bacterial growth.

Learn efficiently without creating waste

In a real lab, this experiment would take more than a week to complete and you would waste countless agar plates. But in a virtual lab, the tedious process of plating and counting the colonies can be skipped, and you can to analyze growth curves in only 30 minutes!

Will you be able to use these methods to find a compound that could be used as an antibiotic?

Learning Objectives

At the end of this simulation, you will be able to:

  • Use given data to plot a growth curve on a semi-logarithmic scale

  • Recognize the different phases of bacterial growth (lag, exponential, stationary, decline)

  • Learn how the growth rate can be calculated from a growth curve

Techniques in Lab

At the end of this simulation, you will be able to:

  • Aseptic Technique

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