For this project, I decided my topic would be about library plates. For one, I have never made a library plate before this class, and I find the concept interesting. As this technique can be helpful and is widely used in experiments (Skodova et al., 1978). While in this specific article it was used as a colony holder that held microbes that were going to be used for PCR (Rodríguez-Lecompte et al., 2002). So as shown they can hold producers, a collection of microbes that have something in common, or collected microbes, etc. For Tiny Earth it was to hold all different microbes from dilution plates and have antibiotic producers in one place.
The way a library plate works is you “pick and patch” (Hernandez et al., 2022). You normally pick a culture from a mixed plate, like we used the dilution plates, and use a sterile toothpick or something else. Then take that toothpick and streak it onto a plate in a little square. You can normally fit around 20 different microbes onto one plate.
I chose to do my project out of air-dry clay because I have recently loved working with this medium. Before this project I would make mini food, animals, and trinkets out of it. So immediately when I was thinking of what to do with this project, I knew I wanted to do something with air-dry clay and then I chose the topic of library plates. I made these library plates out of this medium and then set it out for about a week to dry completely. I then used some acrylic paint and painted on top of the clay. I wanted to make the colors that I saw in my own library plates a little more vibrant on the clay plates to make it stand out a bit more. I made two plates and one is just a library plate that I made with all different patches on it. The other I decided to make an ESKAPE plate just like we did in class. So I created little holes in the clay bottom to create texture and then I painted that over with a greenish/yellow color because that is what I saw in real life with some of the ESKAPEs, just more vibrant in color on the clay to stand out now. I also added zones of inhibition to show antibiotic properties in some microbes, just like I saw in class.