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!!
