Hearts, brains, and blood. These are some of the ingredients used to grow bacteria. Since the introduction of agar to bacterial cultivation methods by Fanny Hesse, microbiologists have been creating variations of agar medium to accommodate microbes that have different requirements for growth. The ingredient up for discussion today: blood.
Five years ago, Tasha Sturm shared a photo of an agar plate full of colorful bacterial colonies in the shape of a handprint. Perhaps you remember seeing it on social media. This bacterial handprint came from her son’s hand after playing outside. But before the handprint photo, Sturm had been growing a collection of photos…
If you’re a microbiologist, there’s nothing quite as infuriating as contaminants growing on an agar plate, crowding out growth of your intended microbes. But this often frustrating aspect of microbiology research, turned into something quite the contrary when Greg McCallum, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham, posted a photo of a colleague’s contaminated…
I clearly remember my high school science teacher running across the room with a pressure cooker in hand making a beeline to the sink. After some sizzling when cold water hits its hot surface, my teacher finally opened it. What were we up to? Making agar plates of course! Years later, research published in PLoS…
Cultivating microorganisms in the lab has not always been what it is now. Thanks to Angelina Fanny Hesse (1850-1934), microbiologists now have a solid medium to grow microbes in the lab. Before Hesse stepped onto the scene, bacteriologists were cultivating microorganisms on an assortment of food – potato, coagulated egg whites, and meat. In 1819,…