Cultivation on cellulose plates with added copper ion overcomes the change in coloration, the colonies appearing as they do following cultivation on potato dextrose agar.

"I got the idea to paint on agar from seeing all the colorful colonies we isolated as part of a science fair demonstration in 2005," he says.

Counting colonies on agar plates is not one of the most entertaining lab tasks. If the redundancy of it all has got you down, you can purchase the Promega Colony Counter app. This nifty iPhone app ...

The internal filamentous cells buckled, generating vortex-structured domains. These domains and the liquid crystal-like arrangement explain the transparency observed in HS-3 colonies on agar.

EZ-Spread™ Plating Beads from AMSBIO (Oxford, UK) allow you to spread bacterial and yeast cells across the surface of an agar plate in just seconds. Eliminating the traditional need for glass rods and ...

Blood agar plates composed of 5-10% defibrinated animal blood (for example, bovine, sheep) are widely used to detect hemolytic activities.