Comments+on+Household+Microbiology

The recipes for media from household products we developed a couple of years ago need to be refined. Their usefulness under pre-college conditions needs to be demonstrated.

A copy our publication on WalMart microbiology is here.

This salty media for organisms from Thai fish sauce needs further development. It needs to be made clearer and more transparent.

Media could be developed for yeast culture using bakers' yeast. This will likely have to be sterilized in pressure-cooker.

Media could be developed for //Lactobacillus acidophilus//, widely available as live tablets. It may be possible to drop the pH enough that sterilization wouldn't be necessary. Many of these supplements contain several species of //Lactobacillus//, and in some cases //Bifidobacterium//. The latter is an anaerobe while the former is facultative.

Another target could be //Spirulina// a cyanobacterium that can be purchased from health food stores. //Spirulina// is typically grown at pH 11 or above. Hence, the media may not need to be autoclaved. //Chlorella//, eukaryotic green alga, and eukaryotic red algae are avalable at health food stores. PetSmart sells a mixture of live green algae. Green, red, and blue-green algae have different sets of tetrapyrrole pigments, chlorophyll, chlorophyll+phycoerythrin, and chlorophyll+phycocyanin, respectively. These should be separable by paper chromatography. Better yet, if we could identify a source of an anion-exchange resin, that would be best.

Amazingly, PetSmart also purports to sell a live mixture of nitrifying bacteria.

In addition, we've done no work investigating performing the kind of microbiology characterizations we normally do, using household chemicals. For instance a pH indicator for pools may be useful in performing fermentation tests. Some dyes may be replaced with household dyes, perhaps. Actually, some WalGreens sell gentian violet, something we call crystal violet, the most important component of Gram stain. We can purchase potassium iodide solution from PetSmart and tincture of 2% idodine from WalGreens. Perhaps we could make the mordant. Can't get safranin, but malachite green from PetSmart may be able to act as counterstain.