Also, is this cell debris or bacterial contamination?
Hybridoma cells with oddly shaped rods in between. They do seem to increase in number, but medium hasn't turned yellow yet and it has been a cpl of days. No directional movements, looks like brownian motion, could also be non motile bacteria?
In the case of bacterial contamination:
Do you simply remove a bit of medium, let this grow on various media like those api ID test strips?
Any help very much appreciated
In our laboraotry, with we need to identify the bacterial contamination, we simply do a PCR for 16s and sequence it.
First, i would take 100µL of medium and grow it on blood agar, to make sure the medium is contaminated or not. You can also color a bit of medium on a slide with Giemsa staining and look for germs under the microscope.
I agree with Antonio, we also will take an aliquot of culture media and pellet, then test by 16S PCR and sequencing. If that is available, if not then you should plate it out to confirm, but you still won't know what it is without selective plates. Do you have any antibiotics in your media? It does not seem like bacteria, but it could be the calm before the storm if they are becoming resistant.
At second glance, it looks more like spores of a fungus to me. I would also test for fungi: i would put some of your medium (3mL for example) in another falcon and grow with medium not supplemented with antifungal drugs. If it's a fungus, you will see nice things! Just incubate both falcons (this one from the picture and the new one) alone in one incubator. Just to avoid dissemenination to other not contaminated falcons. Have you also tested for Mycoplasm? We do it each month routinely.
I think that depends on how much time and money you want to spend on it. I think like Sandrine and James already said, plate a sample is the most parsimonious option. Here is a paper that describes most common contaminant species. (http://www.ijpsi.org/Papers/Vol2(11)/F0211036037.pdf) and here is a website that provides nice pictures so that you can potentially "identify" your contaminant (http://www.bacteriainphotos.com/bacteria-photo-gallery.html). If you get colonies in plate I also recommend to pick a colony and take a look with microscope.
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