[ExI] puzzle

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Bill Wallace:


>  OK - Bill K wins.  Now for second prize (first prize is a week in  
> exotic Biloxi MS - second prize is two weeks in Biloxi):
> Pick a typical bacterium from our guts and do the math.   bill w

The human eye can barely see something that is about .1 milimeter or  
100 microns in scale. E. coli is a rod-shaped bacterium about 2  
microns long and 1 micron across. Assuming that they are in a  
relatively tight packed colony depending on lighting, contrast, and  
excellent eyesight and other factors I would say a minimum of about  
5,000 - 10,000 bacterial cells.

Much more typically however, the average colony on an agarose plate  
after 12 hours of growth, about a milimeter across, has about 10  
million cells.

Stuart LaForge