By Peter Weiss
In their everyday battles against harmful bacteria, physicians, food producers, and others need to know quickly which foe they’re facing. Yet the procedures currently used to identify bacterial colonies are often time-consuming and expensive.
Technicians must wait hours or days for suspect bacteria to grow into a colony for testing in a laboratory. However, by taking a picture of a colony with laser light, a new technique created by Bartlomiej Rajwa of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and his colleagues identifies the colony without further delay.