Usually sheep blood and sometimes horse or rabbit blood is preferred for the preparation blood agar media. But in text books of microbiology goat blood is not advised for this purpose. In our area goat is more available than sheep, however. So why cant we use goat blood in place of sheep blood? What problems would goat blood present?
The blood agar enriched medium is used primarily to determine whether the cultured bacteria can metabolize proteins contained in the blood. For clinical laboratories, hemolysis is a guide for the bacteriological diagnosis and subsequent treatment of the patient. Clearly, if the result of the diagnostic method depends on the type of treatment the patient will receive the answer to the question of Mujibur should not be taken lightly.
A priori any type of blood could be used to prepare the medium. However, we would need a comparative study of membrane proteins of erythrocytes from different species to ensure that claim.
Somewhat simpler, is to compare the growth of various microorganisms in culture media prepared with different vertebrate blood. Fortunately, this study has already been done! Here's the link in PUBMED so you can read the work and draw your own conclusions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC86154/
Depends upon what you mean by blood agar and the type of bacteria you are trying to cultivate. If you are using something like Heart Infusion Agar or Cysteine Heart Agar + blood--then you can usually substitute lyopholized hemoglobin in place of the blood (at final concentration of 1%). For most fastidious, gram negative microbes, this works well and you avoid having to depend upon collecting blood and potential zoonotics in the blood itself--thus the lyopholized hemoglobin can be used as a safe and inexpensive alternative.
Totally agreed with all the comment. I am currently working in Helicobacter pylori. I have to use horse blood instead of any other blood for my culturing.
It depends on bacterium you are cultivating... Some of them like all kinds of blood they receive. Some of them are more picky and do not like some kinds of blood. For your purpose- use sheep blood and goat blood and cultivate your bacteria on them and you will see if there is any difference in growth.
Sheep blood is easy to procure and cheap in western countries, so they use them, I donot think using goat blood would cause any difference. As you would be looking for heamolysis, I used cattle blood for my experiments as we had them avilable at our fecility. If you are looking for heamolytic bacteria , they would all be showing the similar activity irrespective of the origin of the blood.
Earlier bacteria were characterized for identification and diagnostic purposes using sheep blood agar. If one wishes to use some other species blood in blood agar medium, it's essential to study the hemolysis of standard ATCC strains and if they show similar type of hemolysis as with that of sheep blood then source of blood for blood agar should not be an issue.
It doesnt matter you can used goat bllod istead sheep blood we used goat blood and get good result.
We don't prefer human blood due to presence of antibody which can prevent the growth of many bacteria
I think horse blood,human blood, sheep blood only used to form blood agar
You must take blood from healthy animal .
Human blood used from healthy one.
Dalia, the problem here is how to determine that the animal or the person are healthy. It is not only by the individual's appearance at the time of blood collection. You need to know the medical history. And following the same approach for animals, Mujibur should ensure that they have been raised in an animal facility.
You can obtain more precise information in publications like the one in the link
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC86154/
Yes and no! If you targeted the hemolytic activity test of a strain, you must use Columbia Agar enriched with 5-10% SHEEP male blood. For other purposes, like cultivation of fastidious bacteria you can use blood from other species, including human.
@Mihai Mares,Thanks. Is there any difference between male and female sheep blood for the preparation of blood agar media? Human blood contain antibody which can prevent growth of many bacteria. So we don't use human blood.
Sheep blood has been preffered source in the Blood agar due to the fact that sheep RBCs are most sensitive to the the hemolytic toxins released by bacterial cells thus causing hemolytic zones around the colonies over the period of time. Moreover, sheep blood is already standerdized with 5-10% concentration and prefferably defibrinated blood is used in the making of media other wise the anticoagulants(Heparin, EDTA etc) also affect the hemolysis pattern on blood agar.
Even Staphylococcus spp did not show beta hemolytic typical charecteristic if the source of Blood is rabbit or cattle or Human RBCs
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