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The Experiment

We grow two large cultures of cells. One contains cells that will lyse and release plasmids into the supernatant while the other has non-lysing, "normal" cells.

Adding IPTG to both flasks induces lysis in one set of cells but not in the others.

Thanks to qPCR, the supernatant harvested from the lysing culture reveals increased numbers of plasmids while the non-lysing culture exhibits significantly lower numbers of plasmids. A similar test involves transforming the supernatant (whose plasmid content is not known a priori) into cells and counting the number of resulting colonies. The plates containing transformations from the lysing supernatant have vastly superior number of colonies compared to the non-lysing supernatant transformations.