Why do we need to autoclave before culture growth? what are the things we need to autoclave before going for culture growth.
When microbiological media has been made, it still has to be sterilized because of microbial contamination from air, glassware, hands, etc. Within a few hours there will be thousands of bacteria reproducing in the media so it has to be sterilized quickly before the microbes start using the nutrients up. The sterilization process is a 100% kill, and guarantees that the medium will stay sterile UNLESS exposed to contaminants by less than adequate aseptic technique to exposure to air.
The medium that we use in microbiological growth preparation in the form of powder is not sterile. The same note is available for the distillated water and other medium components. Besides, all the materials used in cultivation and enumeration of microorganisms are not sterile. Thus, for cultivating a microorganism, all the materials and the media must be sterile, this allows only the microorganism desired to grow.
NOTE: It is important to perform the sterilization process (by autoclave) correctly because the high temperatures and/or the long times of autoclave leads to modifying the chemical composition of the culture medium such as the decomposition of amino acids, peptides, proteins, fatty acids, carbohydrates, redox value etc. as well as the formation of new molecules such as the Millard reaction ones. All the previous changes in the medium affect the growth of the microorganism (inhibition or stimulation effects) and can lead to non homogeneous results and large standard deviation values of the replications.
We use culture media for many purposes including to enumerate or specifically identify microorganisms, maintenance of pure microbial cultures etc. The purpose of autoclaving is to sterilize your culture medium. Before starting your specific work, you do sterilize your culture media, the tools used, glassware in order to make sure your culture media and the utensils used are free of initial contamination from microorganisms that you do not want in your experiment. If you used the culture medium without sterilizing, then a lot of unwanted microbial contaminants will grow in your medium along with the test organisms you prefer. which will give you false results like overestimation of microbial counts, interferences in biochemical test results of the desired organisms etc. In order to avoid these problems, you should initially sterilize culture media you use
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