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All posts created by estoweva

| posted 02 Nov, 2016 18:23
I tired from a plate last week and earlier in the semester we did use control lysate–will try that again tomorrow.
Posted in: ArthrobacterCell growth issues
| posted 02 Nov, 2016 15:37
Hi Vic,

Our plates for starting the Arthrobacter cultures are never more than 2 weeks old to start a culture from. The cells we used yesterday (that failed) were from a plate I started last Thursday directly from our frozen stock. They grew well overnight. The lawns are good now compared to the summer. We'll try soaking plates, though I did that with one student's plate earlier this semester and got nothing.
E
Posted in: ArthrobacterCell growth issues
| posted 02 Nov, 2016 13:56
New issues!

Ok We figured out some issues after the summer, lower temp, specifically using a sigma quality LB (Never got PYCa to work for us). As plates age, cells will grow but phage won't infect–now only using plates less than 2 weeks old. Every student had a phage, two weeks ago all but two phage stopped forming plaques. We pulled Arthro out of the freezer to start from new cultures instead of passaged ones but we can't recover those other 13 phage (of course this is the year I made everyone enter their phage by mid term instead of later).

Calcium is at 5 mM. Plate with phage on them are now 2-3 weeks old, we've tried picking multiple plaques, higher volumes mixed with cells, struggling to find an explanation and any ideas would be welcome.smile

Emily
Posted in: ArthrobacterCell growth issues
| posted 07 Jul, 2016 15:37
After a very successful year of Arthrobacter phage hunting this summer we are having issues with our cells. We grow our cells in LB (tried PYCa, they seemed to grow more slowly), shaking in a baffled flask at 30 C. Originally we'd get a good culture within a day or two, this summer we seem to need at least three days to get a dense enough culture. We've had cells from one flask work well one day and then not the next (we store the cells in 4C after three days at 30 shaking, this worked before). Lawns are not as dense or as smooth. We bought a new vial from ATCC. Those cells worked, I froze them down, next time I started a culture from frozen, no plaques. The culture I started for students to work with on Tuesday the phage formed decent plaques, though the lawn was not as dense as before, I used those cells on Wednesday and this morning no plaques.

We've tried increasing incubation time, increasing shaking time, doubling the amount of cells per plate (1 ml instead of 0.5ml), different media, different batches of LB, different batches of the components for PYCa, cleaning the flasks differently, restreaking, I keep track of eactly what plate I use to start the cultures. I'm starting to feel like someone's put a curse on us this summer–any ideas?
Posted in: ArthrobacterCell growth issues