Deepak you can have it from any R& D organization of your country or otherwise from any clinical laboratory or hospital.

Hi Deepak:

You can purchase these from:

http://moltox.com/bacterial-tester-strains-products.php

Some of the tester strains do not freeze dry very well so they are incorporated into paper disks.  It is very important when handling these strains to NOT continually transfer and store the cultures when using them.  The mutations are easily lost upon repeated transfer.  Accidental contamination is always a problem upon repeated transfer of type cultures and can be avoided by preparing stock cultures immediately after receiving your culture.

Immediately upon receiving the cultures, you should prepare filter paper disks and sterilize them.  Immerse a large number of paper disks in a heavily inoculated broth or take colonies from agar and place on the disks.

The selection available from Moltox include:

STDiscs™

Salmonella typhimurium strains for use in the bacterial mutagenesis assay described by Maron, D. and Ames., B., Mutation Research, 113:173-215, 1983.

71-097aL

STDisc™ TA97a

(hisD6610, hisO1242, uvrB, rfa, pKM101)

10 discs

71-098L

STDisc™ TA98

(hisD3052, uvrB, rfa, pKM101)

10 discs

71-100L

STDisc™ TA100

(hisG46, uvrB, rfa, pKM101)

10 discs

71-102L

STDisc™ TA102

(hisG428, rfa, pKM101, pAQ1)

10 discs

71-1535

STDisc™ TA1535

(hisG46, uvrB, rfa

10 discs

71-1537

STDisc™ TA1537

(his3076, uvrB, rfa)

10 discs

71-1538

STDisc™ TA1538

(hisD3052, uvrB, rfa)

10 discs

I would avoid getting these from private or government collections because of the issues noted above,.  Most labs will not stock these cultures unless they are currently doing research with them since they die so easily and are subject to the problems noted above.

Best of Luck on your project.  I haven't worked with these in many years but it was fun to do so.  You can also purchase the S-9 fraction commercially these days and do not have to kill rats and remove and grind  the liver to collect the microsomal enzymes as we did when I was working on the assays.

Bruce Ames always cautioned that this is NOT a definitive test for carcinogenicity - only mutagenicity - and reverse mutagenesis at that!   It is important to discuss the results in that context. to maintain credibility.  

Hi Deepak

I have done lots of Ames test for my honors project and I used kits from Environmental Bio-detection Products Inc. They sell kits with colourimetric endpoint which is so much easier to count that colony counting! I used both S. typhimurium TA100 (to test point mutation) and TA98 (frame shift mutation) in the presence and absence  of S9 enzymes which are also sold by that company. I have attached my paper if you wanted to get an idea of the type of results obtained with this assay kit.

Hope it helps

Farzana

Article Ecotoxicity of neutral red (dye) and its environmental applications

Thank you all for your comments.

An update.

The salmonella strains TA98 (1251 MTCC no.) and TA100 (1252 MTCC no.) can be acquired from MTCC, chandigarh (INDIA).