A "bucket of light" for viewing bacterial colonies in soft agar.

The morphologies of bacterial colonies in soft agar media can provide a wealth of information about a strain's locomotor and chemotactic abilities. Photographic images are often the simplest and most effective means of documenting these behavioral phenotypes. Uniform, indirect, transmitted illumination of the plates is essential for obtaining good colony images. This brief chapter describes a simple and relatively inexpensive illumination device for viewing and photographing bacterial colonies in soft agar.