Julia Schwartzman, a microbiologist at MIT, was flummoxed. She was studying the conditions under which bacteria cooperate using Vibrio splendidus 12B01, a strain of an algae-eating species common in ocean water. But even though she was performing what she describes as “the simplest experiment” she could think of—growing V. splendidus in a glass flask that contained large, complex sugars derived from algae—the growth curves for her colonies were off.
In culture, bacteria typically grow exponentially. And at first, that’s what Schwartzman saw. But then the growth rate “would go just crazy,” she says, going up and down erratically such that jagged peaks formed on her initially smooth curves. “Instead of this beautiful exponential growth curve, the results were looking terrible,” she tells The Scientist.
Frustrated, she decided to look at what was going on under the microscope. While she expected the bacteria to aggregate in haphazard clumps, V. splendidus had ...
