The MEGA-plate allows scientists to watch bacteria adapting to antibiotics before their eyes.
You’ve undoubtedly seen this plot before: a cast of characters gets slowly whittled down over the course of a quest, in which increasingly difficult challenges compels the protagonists to acquire new skills. A familiar story, but you’ve never seen it play out in a movie quite like this.
The cast members are bacteria. Their set is a large acrylic dish, four feet wide and two across. It is filled with a nutritious agar jelly that contains varying amounts of an antibiotic. The outermost sections are free of the drug—a safe zone in which microbes can easily grow. But as they move towards the dish’s centre, the concentration of antibiotic goes up in 10-fold increments, and conditions become increasingly deadly. To survive in these toxic zones, they need to evolve resistance.