Growth medium

Types

The most common growth media for microorganisms are nutrient broths (liquid nutrient medium) or LB medium (lysogeny broth). Liquid media are often mixed with agar and poured via a sterile media dispenser into Petri dishes to solidify. These agar plates provide a solid medium on which microbes may be cultured. They remain solid, as very few bacteria are able to decompose agar (the exception being some species in the genera: Cytophaga, Flavobacterium, Bacillus, Pseudomonas, and Alcaligenes). Bacteria grown in liquid cultures often form colloidal suspensions.

The difference between growth media used for cell culture and those used for microbiological culture is that cells derived from whole organisms and grown in culture often cannot grow without the addition of, for instance, hormones or growth factors which usually occur in vivo. In the case of animal cells, this difficulty is often addressed by the addition of blood serum or a synthetic serum replacement to the medium. In the case of microorganisms, no such limitations exist, as they are often unicellular organisms. One other major difference is that animal cells in culture are often grown on a flat surface to which they attach, and the medium is provided in a liquid form, which covers the cells. In contrast, bacteria such as Escherichia coli may be grown on solid or in liquid media.

An important distinction between growth media types is that of defined versus undefined media. A defined medium will have known quantities of all ingredients. For microorganisms, they consist of providing trace elements and vitamins required by the microbe and especially defined carbon and nitrogen sources. Glucose or glycerol are often used as carbon sources, and ammonium salts or nitrates as inorganic nitrogen sources. An undefined medium has some complex ingredients, such as yeast extract or casein hydrolysate, which consist of a mixture of many chemical species in unknown proportions. Undefined media are sometimes chosen based on price and sometimes by necessity – some microorganisms have never been cultured on defined media.

A good example of a growth medium is the wort used to make beer. The wort contains all the nutrients required for yeast growth, and under anaerobic conditions, alcohol is produced. When the fermentation process is complete, the combination of medium and dormant microbes, now beer, is ready for consumption.

Culture media

Culture media contain all the elements that most bacteria need for growth and are not selective, so they are used for the general cultivation and maintenance of bacteria kept in laboratory culture collections.

An undefined medium (also known as a basal or complex medium) contains:

A defined medium (also known as chemically defined medium or synthetic medium) is a medium in which

Some examples of nutrient media include:

Minimal media

Minimal media are those that contain the minimum nutrients possible for colony growth, generally without the presence of amino acids, and are often used by microbiologists and geneticists to grow "wild-type" microorganisms. Minimal media can also be used to select for or against recombinants or exconjugants.

Minimal medium typically contains:

Supplementary minimal media are minimal media that also contains a single selected agent, usually an amino acid or a sugar. This supplementation allows for the culturing of specific lines of auxotrophic recombinants.

Selective media

Selective media are used for the growth of only selected microorganisms. For example, if a microorganism is resistant to a certain antibiotic, such as ampicillin or tetracycline, then that antibiotic can be added to the medium to prevent other cells, which do not possess the resistance, from growing. Media lacking an amino acid such as proline in conjunction with E. coli unable to synthesize it were commonly used by geneticists before the emergence of genomics to map bacterial chromosomes.

Selective growth media are also used in cell culture to ensure the survival or proliferation of cells with certain properties, such as antibiotic resistance or the ability to synthesize a certain metabolite. Normally, the presence of a specific gene or an allele of a gene confers upon the cell the ability to grow in the selective medium. In such cases, the gene is termed a marker.

Selective growth media for eukaryotic cells commonly contain neomycin to select cells that have been successfully transfected with a plasmid carrying the neomycin resistance gene as a marker. Gancyclovir is an exception to the rule, as it is used to specifically kill cells that carry its respective marker, the Herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSV TK).

Examples of selective media include:

Differential media

Differential or indicator media distinguish one microorganism type from another growing on the same medium. This type of media uses the biochemical characteristics of a microorganism growing in the presence of specific nutrients or indicators (such as neutral red, phenol red, eosin y, or methylene blue) added to the medium to visibly indicate the defining characteristics of a microorganism. These media are used for the detection of microorganisms and by molecular biologists to detect recombinant strains of bacteria.

Examples of differential media include:

Transport media

Transport media should fulfill these criteria:

Examples of transport media include:

Enriched media

Enriched media contain the nutrients required to support the growth of a wide variety of organisms, including some of the more fastidious ones. They are commonly used to harvest as many different types of microbes as are present in the specimen. Blood agar is an enriched medium in which nutritionally rich whole blood supplements the basic nutrients. Chocolate agar is enriched with heat-treated blood (40–45 °C), which turns brown and gives the medium the color for which it is named.