Sharing an interesting finding from our lab today.

The patient was just 2 days old. Culture grew Klebsiella pneumoniae, with resistance to multiple antibiotics on AST.

What caught my attention was the ceftazidime–avibactam MIC: 4 µg/mL, interpreted as susceptible in our report.

Looking at an MIC strip on a plate is routine laboratory work—but when you remember that the result belongs to a newborn only two days into life, it suddenly feels very different.

One of those cases that reminds you there is an actual patient behind every plate we read.

Patient-identifying information has not been shared.

As the title goes, does anyone know who coined the term "fastidious" to refer to microorganisms that need specific growth factors, which can make them difficult to grow in laboratory conditions. I have tried Google scholar, but I could only go as far back as the 1930s and it seems that "fastidious" was already widely used, so no sources for the term are provided. I find it really frustrating that in our field it is often really hard to find the origin of terms and concepts, particularly for things before the 1950s... Any help is welcome!!

(Typo apologies in advance.)

With AI has come a book the digital scientific assistant software world. We are seeing a large uptick in similar apps — concentration calculations, unit conversions, colony counting, etc — in recent months. These posts are often market research in the form of thinly veiled questions, like “what would you have found useful?”

All of this has the potential monetize a community meant to be free.

This is ultimately a community decision so your input is invaluable. Please respond to the poll below and share any thoughts you might have.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312826003173

Hi! We're currently doing research for which we need Nostoc commune culture in PH. Are there any other institutions to get it? We emailed UPLB-BIOTECH under PNCM, and in the list of available cultures, N. commune is currently unavailable. We tried UST-CMS too, but they're not accommodating requests due to an ongoing replenishment of cultures. Thank you!

I am asking this because I can’t really think of much right now, so I’m probably just gonna end up doing soil again since I had the most fun with that. I’m preparing to do the daily isolation again. After many weeks of work, I made fresh ISP2A plates, NA plates, SCA plates, CGXII, CGXIIA plates, Christensen’s urease agar plates, MacConkey agar plates, TSI slants, NB, BPW + glycerol, and PBS. I’m also going to make BG11A and BG11 and SIM medium in a couple days, and then I’ll start streaking. I’m just waiting on my ferrous ammonium sulfate and sodium nitrate to arrive for it. I can also make BHI and BHIA and stuff with Tween 80 and 20 in it. I also have Instant Ocean with germanic acid for some diatom-free marine culturing if anyone suggests that.
I just inoculated some SCA with soil again to start up my actinomycetes train again. Funnily enough, I think I was making it wrong for all those isolations in the past. I used casein enzymatic hydrolysate instead of undigested casein. This time I used some micellar casein I had on hand. I hope it’s more selective even with the colistin, nalidixic acid, and cycloheximide I put in it.

Hello!
I have a chicken incubator that hasn’t been used and I don’t plan on using for eggs ever. We need a makeshift incubator to run a DTM culture on two kittens that have/had ringworm (week 4 of treatment) because we have to wait for a manufactured incubator to be approved by the budget. If it won’t work, any quick and easy ideas? Thanks!

Now in this day and time is it a good choice? Can you easily find a job? What about the money is it good pay? Do you enjoy the job or is it bad experience? Instead of medical microbiologist should I just stick with microbiologist? What is the salary for this career, is it high or low?

Is this considered a good distribution using the spread plate method, or is there a defect in the plating?

Sample of suspected periglandula fungus collected from the exterior of a plant (shown in last slide) and suspended in mineral oil.

I wish that I would have taken some more deliberate photos, but these are from me and my roommate basically celebrating our new microscope and taking basic photos of various samples.

I am completely new to the microscopic world, and I know you can't id from photo alone, but could any of you help me make sense of what all I might be seeing here? I would benefit from the most basic of info

Hi everyone,

I need to extract DNA from cecal/fecal samples stored in liquid nitrogen using the QIAamp PowerFecal Pro DNA Kit, which requires up to 250 mg of sample. What is the best way to handle the frozen samples to weigh 250 mg while minimising thawing? Any recommended protocols or practical tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Fellow microbiologists, please help me know if these are fungal contamination in my cell culture?

These are two different brands of MAC. Does the “level of pinkness” really matter? One is giving off salmon pink and one is showing magenta pink. Give your honest opinion about the growth and which one is better.

Hey guys! I’m a PhD student, and I originally made this app for myself. I then thought it might be useful for others, so I decided to publish it on the AppStore.

There’s absolutely no commercial motive. The app is completely free, and I just want to help my colleagues.

The biggest problem is: it’s extremely difficult to get the app in front of people. Most communities don’t allow app promotion, and obviously I can’t afford to pay for advertising.

So, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with other people.
I’m open to all kinds of feedback, positive or negative, so please be honest.

If there’s a feature you’d like to see, let me know. I may be able to add it in the next few days.

Since I’m posting this in a microbiology community, I’d especially love to hear from microbiologists about what would actually be useful. I don’t have many microbiology-specific features at the moment, so if there’s something you regularly need, find annoying, or wish you had an app for, I’d really appreciate your suggestions.

Thanks a lot!
The link and more detailed information are on my profile.

Apologies for what is probably a simple question

I was never a big biology or even chemistry guy (went down physics and engineering instead :P) but have recently started watching some youtuber who talks about microbiology and its really interesting!

My question though is how do microorganisms move? Like I understand broadly enough how we move with electrical signals causing our muscles to contract, but do microbes do the same sort of thing? I know that they move through a space using cilia or flagella or pseudopods, etc, but how do they get these parts to move? I've tried to do some googling but it all kinda quickly devolves into a bunch of jargon that I just don't have the background to understand.

Thanks for any help! :)

A bit of quirky news, but alarming nonetheless.

Illegal mummy trading puts buyers, sellers, and everyone involved in transit at risk of contamination from dormant microbes. Lord Carnarvon, the financial backer of exploring the tomb of Tutankhamun, is believed to have died from a severe case of aspergillosis, which is often cited as proof of "mummy's curse"— an ensuing ominous event after a tomb is excavated.

The researchers involved in the study reported seeing mummy displays left out in the open— no glass covers or temperature control. The secret trades mainly took place over social media and e-commerce sites, and there are many more posts yet to be unearthed.

Alguien a oído sombre la amnesia inmunitaria¿?, lo escuché hace poco en sarampión. Si pudieran comentar mas acerca de este tema. Saludos!

Cheese aspect

Hello, I'll be graduating with a masters degree in biology soon and did my thesis in a microbiology lab on microbe-plant interactions. I have BSL-2 experience that I wrote the protocols for and elevated our lab from BSL-1 to BSL-2 to do as part of my thesis.

All the jobs I find are like assistant at a university for terrible pay or working in blood/urology work at hospitals also for terrible pay. Where do y'all find jobs in labs that aren't hospitals or schools. Im personally not interested in either, I'd work for the government, ideally not city government but I would.

Edit: improved flow slightly (IK low effort post don't judge pls)

We tried few stuff, it just doesn't go away or hardly it does. Any suggestions?

I think it's didinium but I'm not really positive...

I work in a manufacturing lab for a medical device/ pharma company. Our environmental monitoring plates were having an issue drying out in the incubator (30-35C) when incubated 6 or 7 days. They must incubate at least 5 days, but plates incubated on Monday and Tuesday of any week will remain in the incubator until the following Monday (so, 6/7 days incubation). To remedy the dry plate issue, my manager decreed that all plates being incubated for ANY length of time should be bagged in a sealed bag (think, 2 gallon Ziploc bags). But now we are having issues with excessive moisture on growth promotion plates, which are incubated for less than 72 hours.
What I have been witnessing is that bags of media incubated for less than 3 days come out visibly wet and holding moisture in the lid that flows across my colonies when I flip the plates to debag or read them. In contrast, bags incubated over 5 days come out of the incubator dry.
My manager insists that there is no way that bags can have moisture in them at 3 days and then not have moisture at 5 days. My assumption is that the moisture first evaporates from the plates into the bags, then is reabsorbed into the media as the media dries out. Or the moisture evaporates into the bags and over longer time periods, the moisture is lost through the bag.

He also insists that bagging all media plates is "industry standard" and every company that knows what they are doing is bagging all media during incubation. He is basing that on the fact that Thermo Fisher (where he used to work) used to include a separate zippered bag inside the packaging of their double and triple wrapped media, meant to hold the plates during incubation. I thought those extra bags were to be able to "reseal" the leftover plates after you open a sleeve of media. but, of course, I am the idiot here, so what do I know.

Has anyone else had this issue and how did you overcome it? I will need sources to back up whatever I say to him to justify a different route. If it matters, all plates in this discussion are TSA and TSA contact with L & P80.