Students will grow bacterial colonies and determine the effectiveness of antibiotics in killing the bacteria.
Most bacteria can proliferate rapidly through binary fission, one type of asexual reproduction.
Under optimal conditions, certain bacteria can divide as rapidly as once every 20 minutes. This ability to reproduce at such great speed has proved invaluable to geneticists. Initially, scientists were not sure whether bacteria would be useful subjects for genetics research because it seemed that their method of reproduction was too simple. Research found that although bacteria do not reproduce sexually, like plants and animals, they do have the mechanisms for transferring genes from one individual organism to another. These mechanisms allow bacterial strains to become resistant to antibiotics.