John Glass, PhD is a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Glass was part of the team that created the first bacterial cell with a chemically synthesized genome. View Full Profile.

Bacteria have mostly been portrayed as villains that make us sick, but the Human Microbiome Project showed that we share our body with an astounding number of bacteria.

Under ideal conditions, bacterial cell proliferation is exponential ... Cells at the edge of the colony (light green in the images) rapidly grew, encroaching on their neighbors’ space. Consequently, ...