Hi,
Would anyone have already seen such black swimming rods in cell culture (see picture).
Here are their key features:
- The medium never turns turbid;
- At first, cultured cells look OK, but they eventually detach and die;
- Some of these particles are clearly motile, rotating on themselves;
- Contaminated medium grows in LB, which supports a bacterial origin;
- These particles seem to grow slowly, over several days, at least in a poor stemcell medium (but again, they grow overnight in LB)
Any thought more than welcome.
Many thanks for your help.
Look like some type of rod shaped bacteria to me. If your cell culture media contains antibiotics (like pen-strep) they might be somewhat resistant to the antibiotics, but are still inhibited enough by them that it reduces their growth. They look like they're quite long, which could indicate that they're undergoing filamentation as part of a stress response (though some bacteria just grow this long anyway). That might explain why your cell culture media never gets turbid, it actually takes a pretty high bacterial cell concentration to make media turbid.
Or maybe the cell culture media is deficient in a nutrient they like, but which is plentiful in LB.
If you're really really curious what they are, you could try streaking them out on an LB agar plate then do 16S sequencing on a colony or two.
Thanks a lot Alexandra Johnson
Achromobacter spp, which are Gram-negative bacillus, could look like that I believe as they grow as pretty long rods. I had not in mind the filamentation as response to stress. Indeed, the medium is presumably to poor for rapid growth, as compared to LB.
Thanks again.
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