Bacterial lawn

Bacterial lawn is a term used by biologiststo describe the appearance of bacterialcolonies when all the individual colonies on a petri-dishmerge together to form a mat of bacteria. Although it is occasionally used as a synonym for biofilm, the term primarily applies to the simple, clonal, unstructured mats of organisms that typically only form on rich laboratory growth media. Biofilms—the aggregated form of microorganismsmost commonly found in nature— are generally more complex and diverse and marked by relatively amounts of extracellular structural matrix relative to the cellular biomass.

Bacterial lawns find use in screens for antibiotic activity.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial+lawn Wikipedia article Bacterial lawn.