A culture of Bacillus anthracis

Bacterial culture

The most common evolution of microbiological culture uses petri dishes with a layer of agar-based growth medium in them to grow bacterial cultures. This is generally done inside of an incubator. Another method is liquid culture, where the bacteria are grown suspended in a liquid nutrient medium. Bottles of liquid culture are often placed in shakers in order to introduce oxygen to the liquid and maintaining the uniformity of the culture.

Virus and phage culture

Virus or phage cultures require host cells for the virus or phage to multiply in. For bacteriophages, cultures are grown by infecting bacterial cells. The phage can then be isolated from the resulting plaques in a lawn of bacteria on a plate. Virus cultures are obtained from their appropriate eukaryotic host cells.

Eukaryotic cell culture

The term culture can also apply to eukaryotic microorganisms such as yeast and be used as a synonym for tissue culture, which involves the growth of cells or tissues explanted from a multi-cellular organism.

Isolation of pure cultures

For single-celled eukaryotes, such as yeast, the isolation of pure cultures uses the same techniques as for bacterial cultures. Pure cultures of multicellular organisms are often more easily isolated by simply picking out a single individual to initiate a culture. This is a useful technique for pure culture of fungi, multicellular algae, and small metazoa, for example.

Developing pure culture techniques is crucial to the observation of the specimen in question. The most common method to isolate individual cells and produce a pure culture, is to prepare a streak plate. The streak plate method is a way to physically separate the microbial population, and is done by spreading the inoculum back and forth with an incoluating loop over the solid agar plate. Upon incubation, colonies will arise and hopefully single cells will have been isolated from the biomass.

See also

• Blood culture
• Sputum culture
• Screening cultures

cs:Kultura (biologie) de:Bakterienkultur es:Cultivo (microbiología) fr:Culture microbiologique it:Coltura di microrganismi ja:?? pt:Cultura bacteriana ru:?????? ???????? sv:Bakterieodling tr:Kültür (biyoloji) uk:????? ????????