We worked with a really cool bacteria in lab today called streptomyces it is in all of the soil. In fact the streptomyces is what gives the soil its characteristic smell. This earthy dirt smell is caused by geosmins that the streptomyces produce. These bacteria need oxygen to breathe and can use a lot of nutrients from the soil that they are in. One of the main reasons I chose to write about them is because of how cool they look when they are plated. They are white colonies that are sort of leathery. They stick to the agar and are almost impossible to get off, we have to restreak them which took a while. They sort of look dried out but they aren’t, the white part of the colonies are the spores that are produced by the streptomyces. When you restreak them the white usually rubs off of the colonies first, this is because you have only collected the spores. The streptomyces look kind of grey and drab, but this is the part that sticks to the agar so it is really hard to remove. I can’t wait to observe them under a microscope and see what they look like up close.
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