The weird and wonderful life under a microscope

If I ask you to imagine a bacterial colony, you'd probably picture some jellybean-looking bacterial cells, floating about in a liquid, or possibly on a Petri dish. We picture these occurring in human habitats, or animals, or toilets. Two decades of research have revealed that this may not be the truth, and we're still uncovering more surprises.
I'll give you a whistlestop tour through this fascinating, unseen world, and explain how our newest work is rewriting the rules for biofilms again, offering tantalising hints at a level of bacterial communication we never even imagined.

The more we use the wrong antibiotics, the more bacteria get resistant to them. Unfortunately, doctors need to make quick decisions to stop infections getting out of control, and non-specific or unnecessary antibiotics are often prescribed before we know for sure what the infection is. We think we can dramatically speed up the time it takes to identify bacteria causing infections, going from days to minutes, and we can do this with lasers.