Weeks 2 and 3
My group couldn't grow many colonies of marine bacteria from Weymouth. Results are pretty boring so far, even from the rest of the class, but should get more interesting when we find out what works best as cultivating marine bacteria is notoriously difficult. We're covering the whole of the UK coastline from Ramsgate to Orkney and also Northern Ireland. I will be filtering additional buckets of seawater next week from different locations and seeing if we can grow anything more interesting using adapted methods. We are considering using a laboratory rocker device to grow colonies of interest in a mixture of the seawater, sediment and Difco marine agar for a week. We will then isolate any interesting compounds, understanding how they grow, how they thrive in concert with other microorganisms + selected nutrients and mechanisms of action using different methods, including whole genome sequencing after serial dilutions quantify the most appropriate concentrations of media. ...
