Question: have you ever seen staphyloccocus aurea bacteria under a microscope and what is the coolest bacteria you have seen?

Daren Fearon answered on 27 Jun 2014:

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at bacteria under microscopes as I am more interested in the proteins inside them. Usually, we grow bacteria on agar (a kind of solid gel that acts as food for bacteria) so we can see colonies of them. We also grow bacteria in a liquid media that contains all they need to survive and the longer you incubate it for the cloudier it gets as more and more bacteria are produced.

The bacteria I mainly work on at the moment are things like yersinia pestis which causes the plague and bacillus anthracis which causes anthrax. These are pretty deadly diseases, a few cells can kill. So only specialised labs can work with the actual bacteria.