If the school doesn't have any media a slice of potato cooked
in an pressure cooker for 15 minutes would grow something.
You could do the same with cheese and grow some molds.
Beef stock and gelatin will also grow some stuff. Even coffee
grounds will grow some molds as will coffee.
That makes me think that a little gelatin, potato and sugar in
a coffee machine should make a pretty good media that is
easy and safe to make. It would still need a trip through
the pressure cooker to kill the spores but some work could
be done by repeated boiling and incubation to kill the spore
formers.
There are a lot of ways to grow microbes other than the
conventional ways. Some kind of bug will grow where
ever there are enough groceries and suitable conditions.
If the objective is to learn something about bacteria
professional media is not necessary. It may even be
a better exercise to make the media from household
items to show that bacteria can grow on what we eat.
Gordon W5RED
G. C. Couger gcouger at couger.com Stillwater, OK
www.couger.com/gcouger
"You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take." - Wayne Gretzky
----- Original Message -----
From: "Errol" <E.S.Kwan at massey.ac.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.bio.microbiology,bionet.microbiology
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 5:04 PM
Subject: Re: I need help
> It is a project he/she is doing for extra credit, not one the school
> wants done for itself. This student chose their own topic and I'm not
> sure what sort of resources this high school has, I'm not sure about
> America but here in New Zealand we never had those sorts of compounds
> for making up media.
>>> On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 19:52:05 +0200, lamb
> <L.A.M.Buisman at cable.A2000.nl> wrote:
>> >Errol wrote:
> >
> >> I should have used the word 'enrichment' instead of selective. But
> >> for Riffi's experiment a general media like nutrient agar should be
> >> used as this student sounds like the environment is to be sampled,
> >> remember this is a high school student and looking at the microbes in
> >> the environement would be a better starting point for learning than
> >> getting straight into the pathogenic microbes.
> >>
> >> So I think that the media to be used should be nutrient agar. The
> >> question is does this student have access to all of the components?
> >
> >As he/she said, it was to be a school's project. So the school would be
providing
> >the material.
> >
> >Loes
> >
> >
>
