Tag: Culture

One of the most important jobs in a microbiology lab is maintaining a culture collection to ensure all the bacterial and fungal strains necessary for research are kept pure and thriving. Unfortunately, without a consistent research programme, this often doesn’t happen in our labs. I need a couple of very specific E. coli strains for my research, but I came back in at the start of this research period to plates for these strains like the first one in this picture of DH5a – almost a year old, so completely dry and, to the unobservant, useless. But, with a little encouragement, I got the few cells out alive as you can see in the second plate, and then within another day to the pure streak in the last plate.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky with my second strain, C2110, and I’ve had to revert back to a stab culture I finally unearthed, but hopefully I should see growth this morning when I get into the lab.

As a result, I’ve got some of you working on creating a culture collection of some of the random bottles of cells I’ve found lurking around in the incubator room, by creating slopes and stabs for storage. It will really be a revelation if we can get it all sorted out!!

Started the morning off by streaking nutrient agar plates from cultures thought to be ‘dead’ and put them in the incubator til tomrrow. Stock cultures from the lab were previously streaked on agar plates, today my task was to isolate single colonies and make up streak plates, these were placed in the incubator until tomorrow when they will hopefully have grown so they can then be gram stained and identified. Then i chose a project to conduct over the summer, If a pure sample of soya can be located then i hope to design a working PCR test to detect GM soya in non GM foods.