Why we freeze dried cells

For Key. coli to work as intended and not deteriorate we need need to things to occur:

1. The E. coli cells must be kept inactive so that nutrients is not depleted causing the transformed cells to die
2. The E. coli cells must be able to be activated after inactivation to allow the fluorescent genes to be expressed to give the key its unique fluorescent code which will allow access to the appliance.

To accomplish this, we chose to freeze dry the cells within the key. This involved