We are doing experiments on growth of bacteria with plastic as the sole carbon source.
We use M9 minimal salts, but I am concerned that it may not be sufficient as it contains only major nutrients (NH4 , phosphate, sulfate, Mg, Na, K) and lacks, among others, Fe, Co, Ni, Mo, Cu, and Zn.
Does anyone know of a suitable trace elements solution I can buy. It's awfully tedious to make it.
Have you considered a domestic garden trace element mix from your local garden centre/nursery/hardware? If you're not particularly worried about purity, 1g/L would probably provide enough of everything to get the bacteria going.
On the other hand, there is probably a lab nearby that does microbiological work plating bacteria on petri dishes, they might make up stocks of trace elements for plating: you could "borrow" some of their solution. It might not match the requirements of your bacteria, but it's a start.
Third option, make up your own stock at 1000x the required final concentrations. Takes a little while (not awfully tedious, but only a little tedious) but then 1 ml/L is easy to prepare for your bulk solutions and is under your control, isn't contaminated with strange compounds and doesn't rely on the generosity (and randomness) of other labs.
Very much along the lines of Matthew's reply above, in developing the synthetic groundwater for my mesocosm I did an inventory of what needed to be in the SGW and a comparison table of published compositions for SGW used in other labs, and ended up combining our local tap water that was mixed with a concentrated stock solution derived from fertilizer I bought at the hardware store. This is done 10kg per batch with the Sodium Bicarb buffer and the fertilizer extract added by weight to the total solution. The SGW is then aerated before use to a) remove chlorination, and b) to keep the reservoir from going anaerobic.
A caveat is that if you take the fertilizer approach, be sure to extract far more stock solution than you think you will ever need because the composition between packages of the same brand with the same labeled nutrient concentration will vary between batches as will your extraction efficiency. You can guess how I figured that out..... In the meantime check your tap water composition and maybe use that as the basis instead of fancy lab water.
Good luck.
Thanks, Matthew and Ned. Time for a trip to the local garden center. And thanks for the tip about sparging out the chlorine with air; I wouldn't have thought of that.
Aloha Andrew, glad to help. Check with your municipal water supply to see how they add chlorine to the water if they do. If gaseous chlorine like we have the sparging will work. If chloramines it gets more challenging as it requires adding something else to remove it and I've forgotten what it is.
The sparging also does a few other things in my system such as keeping the feedwater from going anaerobic in the headworks. That needs to happen in a controlled manner downstream.
Good luck.
Thanks for the tip. I'll check. They may even be using UV; it's increasingly popular in Norway.
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