Question

What is the purpose of kanamycin in the agar plates?

Answer 1

Ans. Kanamycin binds to 30s subunit of 70s type ribosome and interferes with bacteria protein synthesis machinery, which leads to bacterial cells death.

# Most frequently, it used to identify the transformed bacteria cells as follow-

I. The wild-type bacteria cells (say, E. coli) are susceptible to kanamycin. Thus, such cells don’t grow on agar plate in presence of this antibiotic.

II. The bacterial cells which get transformed by taking up the specified plasmid with kan^R plasmid become antibiotic resistance to it. So, the colonies of transformed cells (kanamycin resistant) can be differentiated from wild type/ non-transformed cells (kanamycin susceptible) by plating them on suitable agar plate through replica plate technique.