When growing bacteria, if you use any heavy carbon sources like malt extract and soyabean meal etc., it gets settled similar to the bacterial cells and forms a pellet. How do you then separate the bacterial biomass from the rest of the things and how do you make sure it is the correct component?
Hello, you can centrifuge the biomass around 3500 rpm. than use precipitate. If no clear precipitation you can add water to dilute the compounds from growing media, and again perform centrifugation.
some of my carbon and nitrogen sources are large and also produce pellet. in that case, what can I do?
You could do serial dilutions and plate on agar plates to determine the CFU per unit volume and then calculate the biomass from the number of bacteria. Or maybe just knowing the cell number is sufficient.
That would do it. But in my case I'm using a huge amount of samples and taking readings every hour. This would become impractical for me to perform as there are hundreds of readings.
Is the change in turbidity of the culture visible to the eye as the culture grows? If so then you can probably just do optical density readings and use as the zero point (blank) sterile media with the carbon source.
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