I see. In general, there are a few questions you want to answer before you proceed. The first of which is, "how anaerobic do you need your media?" Some methods will make your media anaerobic enough for most microbes, while some people are more stringent and go further by adding chemicals to their media that react with oxygen to remove it. In general, making your media anaerobic is a combination of boiling to drive off gasses dissolved in solution, bubbling with an inert gas to drive off oxygen, and adding a reducing agent to react with the remaining oxygen.
You need the proper vessels to store your cultures. Bulch tubes are a standard, as are wheaton serum bottles. Both of these containers come with butyl rubber stoppers about 1.5-2cm thick. The benefit of these stoppers is that they are impenetrable to oxygen and can be pierced multiple times with a 23-21 gauge needle to insert or remove liquids. If you want to be very careful, people will also use glass or plastic syringes for this that have been kept in an anaerobic chamber for days so that any oxygen stuck to them degasses...I don't know how much of this is wishful thinking or fact.
To make your media anaerobic
1) Some people will simply insert a probe into their media and bubble nitrogen through it for a few hours, or even overnight. They consider this to be anaerobic, I don't. But, it is good enough for many applications.
2) I would go a step further and add a reducing agent to remove the remaining oxygen from solution. Common reducing agents include sodium sulfide, titanium nitrilotriacetate, cysteine, or a combination of sodium sulfide and Cysteine. Cysteine is probably the most mild and preferred reducing agent, but it could easily be a carbon source. In that case, sulfide may be used. However, sulfide will produce sulfates upon reaction with the oxygen, so if you don't want sulfate, you may not want to use sulfide. Additionally, sulfate will form on the outside of the sulfide crystals, so many people wash the crystals in anaerobic water prior to use to remove the sulfate. If you're using a palladium catalyst in your anaerobic chamber, sulfide will destroy it. Titanium nitrilotriacetate is quite strong, but is toxic to some microbes....pick your poison.
3) use an indicator such as resazurin to tell you if the media is truly anaerobic. Resazurin will turn pink if oxygen is present.
My preferred protocol is to bring the media, including resazurin, to a boil in a round bottom flask --> allow to boil for at least a few minutes. This will drive off most of the oxygen dissolved in the media. --> run a jet of nitrogen over the media while it cools or preferably bubble it through the solution. --> once the media is cool, quickly seal the container and put it in an anaerobic chamber. If an anaerobic chamber isn't available, the remaining steps will have to be done under a jet of nitrogen to keep the media anaerobic....anaerobic chambers, such as from COY, are a godsend. --> add your reducing agent and wait until the resazurin has turned clear. It starts blue, turns pink once the reducing agent has been added, and then turns clear, indicating that your media is oxygen-free. However, sometimes it turns pink again, so wait a while the first few times you make media to see if this happens --> dispense media into serum bottles --> stopper the bottles and seal with aluminum crimp --> autoclave media --> once cool, add your microbes and relax.
One more note. Some components of media, such as many common vitamins, are not autoclavable. If this is the case, filter sterilise your vitamins and add them after autoclaving. The reducing agent should take are of the minimal oxygen introduced since you typically don't add much volume of vitamin solution.
Your question is far too broad. What do you want to do with them? Do you mean, "how do I culture them?" Or, "How do a keep the solution anearobic?" Please provide detailed insight into what you're trying to accomplish.
I see. In general, there are a few questions you want to answer before you proceed. The first of which is, "how anaerobic do you need your media?" Some methods will make your media anaerobic enough for most microbes, while some people are more stringent and go further by adding chemicals to their media that react with oxygen to remove it. In general, making your media anaerobic is a combination of boiling to drive off gasses dissolved in solution, bubbling with an inert gas to drive off oxygen, and adding a reducing agent to react with the remaining oxygen.
You need the proper vessels to store your cultures. Bulch tubes are a standard, as are wheaton serum bottles. Both of these containers come with butyl rubber stoppers about 1.5-2cm thick. The benefit of these stoppers is that they are impenetrable to oxygen and can be pierced multiple times with a 23-21 gauge needle to insert or remove liquids. If you want to be very careful, people will also use glass or plastic syringes for this that have been kept in an anaerobic chamber for days so that any oxygen stuck to them degasses...I don't know how much of this is wishful thinking or fact.
To make your media anaerobic
1) Some people will simply insert a probe into their media and bubble nitrogen through it for a few hours, or even overnight. They consider this to be anaerobic, I don't. But, it is good enough for many applications.
2) I would go a step further and add a reducing agent to remove the remaining oxygen from solution. Common reducing agents include sodium sulfide, titanium nitrilotriacetate, cysteine, or a combination of sodium sulfide and Cysteine. Cysteine is probably the most mild and preferred reducing agent, but it could easily be a carbon source. In that case, sulfide may be used. However, sulfide will produce sulfates upon reaction with the oxygen, so if you don't want sulfate, you may not want to use sulfide. Additionally, sulfate will form on the outside of the sulfide crystals, so many people wash the crystals in anaerobic water prior to use to remove the sulfate. If you're using a palladium catalyst in your anaerobic chamber, sulfide will destroy it. Titanium nitrilotriacetate is quite strong, but is toxic to some microbes....pick your poison.
3) use an indicator such as resazurin to tell you if the media is truly anaerobic. Resazurin will turn pink if oxygen is present.
My preferred protocol is to bring the media, including resazurin, to a boil in a round bottom flask --> allow to boil for at least a few minutes. This will drive off most of the oxygen dissolved in the media. --> run a jet of nitrogen over the media while it cools or preferably bubble it through the solution. --> once the media is cool, quickly seal the container and put it in an anaerobic chamber. If an anaerobic chamber isn't available, the remaining steps will have to be done under a jet of nitrogen to keep the media anaerobic....anaerobic chambers, such as from COY, are a godsend. --> add your reducing agent and wait until the resazurin has turned clear. It starts blue, turns pink once the reducing agent has been added, and then turns clear, indicating that your media is oxygen-free. However, sometimes it turns pink again, so wait a while the first few times you make media to see if this happens --> dispense media into serum bottles --> stopper the bottles and seal with aluminum crimp --> autoclave media --> once cool, add your microbes and relax.
One more note. Some components of media, such as many common vitamins, are not autoclavable. If this is the case, filter sterilise your vitamins and add them after autoclaving. The reducing agent should take are of the minimal oxygen introduced since you typically don't add much volume of vitamin solution.
Adding to Steven Robbins' answer, we did not have a anaerobic chamber to perform inoculation and other procedures in. So after purging the empty serum vial with the stopper on with nitrogen gas, I pressurized it with nitrogen and then forced the prepared medium, innoculum and other solutions into the vial using a syringe and a needle after which I used the same syringes to let the serum vial release any extra pressure that was formed in there. If the butyl rubber stoppers have been correctly used and crimped with aluminium crimps, this helps in preventing any oxygen intrusion during the additions of different solutions. I followed similar procedures to take samples from the vial.