If you are dealing with bacterial isolates in your lab and you want to use more than one colony, creating maintenance lawns is a great method for this!
You will need the following materials:
Quadrant streak plates
1 new LB agar plate for each isolate
Sterile cotton swabs
To start, label your new agar plates along the edge with your initial, the date, and which isolate you picked from your quadrant streak plate. An isolated colony will look like a single circle of growth that is set apart from the others. It will not touch other circles. You can draw circles with a sharpie on the OUTSIDE of your plate over where you see the isolated colony and label it with a letter. This will keep track of your different isolates so you don't mix up the colonies when making the maintenance plates.
Use a cotton swab to pick up only one isolated colony from the quadrant streak plate and gently spread it evenly over the entire surface of the corresponding new LB plate.
Tip: Streaking in multiple directions will help you get a more confident, even spread of the colony!
Repeat this for all quadrant streaks with your desired isolated colonies. These plates will be incubated at 26°C for 24-48 hours once you have completed streaking. You should observe your maintenance lawns after this period to confirm that the bacterial lawn is morphologically identical to its isolate source!
After two weeks, you may see that the lawn has turned into a slightly yellow or darker color than it was initially. This is completely normal, however, it is suggested to create fresh maintenance lawns after they have become older than 2 weeks.
Good luck with your experiments!
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