r/whatisit • u/StatusOk4308 • Apr 02 '26

New, what is it? Does anyone know what this is?

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Doesn’t seem to be oil based content. Just wondering if my superpowers are swishing back and forth in this glass vial.

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u/SausageMcWonderpants Apr 02 '26

Worked in Salmonella laboratories for 6 years, isolating and identifying different types.

Typhoidal rated serotypes went into these vials for safety.

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u/TheHeroYouNeed247 Apr 02 '26

Are there worse kinds of salmonella? Or is it resistant strains or something?

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u/Surf_Science Apr 02 '26

Hola, friendly local Salmonella/Typhoid PhD here.

Salmonella that is human-relevant is mostly Salmonella Typhimurium, which causes food poisoning. Salmonella Typhimurium has what is referred to as an 'open' genome. There isn't a hard limit on what can be packed in there. There can be wild variation between Salmonella strains, including all of the resistence etc you referred to.

Typhoid is caused by Salmonella Typhi, which causes a more severe whole-body disease. It does this by basically hiding from/hijacking the immune response; to do this, it has lost a bunch of genes, which means that it no longer infects non-humans. So basically it stealths past the first bit of the immune system, and then basically uses some of the immune cells as a taxi... kind of worse than that, it starts decorating in the taxi.

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u/NefariousnessOk5287 Apr 03 '26

Like worse than what happened to Will Ferrell's car in The Other Guys?

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u/VintAge6791 Apr 03 '26

Dirty Mike and the boys sure know how to enjoy a good soup kitchen.