Goldspringer

Science isn’t just about pouring colourful liquids between test tubes. Sometimes your experiments are bizarre and fun — more often they’re tedious and require more focus than you knew you had. Below are the weirder technologies that researchers used to work out why bacteria make geosmin.

A gold-plated ant ready for the electron microscope. Photo by AntWeb on Wikipedia.

How can you tell if your bacterial spores are carried on springtail skin?

1. Let starved springtails feed on your bacteria for an hour.
2. Collect the springtails and soak them in acetone, the active ingredient in nail polish remover. This removes anything loosely attached to the springtails’ skin.
3. Air-dry the springtails, then glue them to ‘specimen stubs’, which look like drawing pins.
4. ‘Sputter coat’ your springtails with gold. A sputter coater uses electromagnets to fire metal at a target — in this case, a springtail — with enough energy to form a very strong bond.
5. Image your gold bugs with a scanning electron microscope. The microscope fires a beam of electrons at a sample, which would destroy a soft sample like a springtail. Coating the bug in gold allows its structure to survive and be imaged.
6. Now you have a beautifully high-res image of springtail skin, to which bacterial spores are clearly attached!