You've Just Isolated a New Bacterium in Pure Culture, and You

question 69

Multiple Choice

You've just isolated a new bacterium in pure culture, and you culture it on a general purpose medium where its cells have a rod-shape (bacillus) morphology. In addition to culturing it on solid media, you inoculate a slide to grow it as a bio?lm. When you use confocal microscopy to image the bio?lm, you observe that there are several cellular morphologies, ranging from coccus to coccobacillus to long bacillus. The best explanation for this observation is that _______.

• A) the bio?lm is no longer a pure culture of the microbe
• B) the bio?lm culture was not incubated under the appropriate conditions
• C) the microenvironments within a bio?lm promote structural variation
• D) the confocal microscope is out of adjustment

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Definitions:

Development Through Time

The process of change, growth, or evolution of something or someone over a period of time.

Moving Company

A business that provides services to transport goods and household items from one location to another.

Margin of Error

An indicator of the precision of an estimate in survey data, showing the range within which the true value is expected to lie with a certain probability.

Confidence Interval

A range of values, derived from sample statistics, that is believed to contain the true population parameter with a certain probability.