When you think of bacteria, you might think about a bunch of mindless, single-celled bugs blindly roaming the world in complete ignorance. But over the past few decades, scientists have found bacteria are much more complicated than that.
Now, a group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin has come up with a new way of studying how bacteria interact with the world – and each other.
You see, scientists have a couple of problems when it comes to studying bacteria.
“I mean since the time of Pasteur, we’ve been growing bacteria in these large glass tubes,” says Dr. Marvin Whiteley, a microbial physiologist at UT-Austin. “The problem is most of those bacteria in those conditions – that’s not how they grow out in nature.”
“It just doesn’t look like the body to cells. You throw cells down on a piece of glass,” says Jason Shear, a chemist at UT.