3 ms·
I've heard similar things said for dirt, and even the human gut. The big story is that we have this incredible ability to isolate insanely tiny fragments of DNA
by acjohnson55 12y ago
I've heard similar things said for dirt, and even the human gut. The big story is that we have this incredible ability to isolate insanely tiny fragments of DNA, but there are a lot of organisms all around us we can't yet identify, because scientists have been able to isolate the organisms themselves, intact, and grow them.
Although there was an article on here not too long ago about how a guy discovered that autoclaving standard growth media was found to be producing tiny amounts of unwanted chemicals that had been inhibiting the growth of many types of bacteria thought to be unculturable.
- tomkinstinch 12y agoSpot on. Sometimes switching from agar agar to a different hydrocolloidal grown medium like gellan gum can enable the culture of bacteria that would be otherwise difficult to culture. (And in food science, different guns are used for different purposes as well—gellan, agar, xanthan, guar, etc.)
- adrianN 12y agoHere's a publication about that http://jb.asm.org/content/194/16/4151.full http://jb.asm.org/content/194/16/4151.full
- jballanc 12y agoAnd then you have the fun media like Blood Agar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_plate#Blood_agar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_plate#Blood_agar). But it's not just finding the right media, many microbes are obligate symbionts meaning that we'll never be able to culture them in isolation. I vaguely recall a spc. of Mycoplasma that would only grow in the presence of a peptidoglycan matrix containing E. coli (though it's been a while, so I could be misremembering). For situations like this, having the ability to do raw analysis on environmental DNA is hugely beneficial.