Hi everyone,
I am trying to grow marine cyanobacteria from my samples using BG11 and L1 as nutrient and agar as gelling agent. I found agarolytic bacteria thrives in my plates, liquifying my agar. So, I tried using gellan gum as an alternative to agar. In my trials, I keep getting wobbly unstable gellan gels even though I used magnesium sulphate as cations. After overnight upside-down, I got dome-shaped gellan gel surface. When I tried using cell spreader, the gelling broke. Has anyone encounter this problem?
Gellan gum has a tendency to not solidify well if the salt concentration is too high, like in media with seawater. You can try to let those plates dry out more then usual before plating and simply add 0.5-1ml of diluted cell suspension and just swirl the plate to distribute the liquid.
Kristova Yubilius Indrataruna I have two suggestions for you: 1) Use ASNIII medium for marine CB: BG-11 was elaborated for freshwater CB; 2) Use very purified agarose (like Kim Sea) instead of either agar or gellan gum because very purified agarose does not support the proliferation of heterotrophs. Good luck. Igor Brown
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