Any advice on seperating dead bioluminescent dinoflagellates from the living?

[osazuwa]

We are farming some containers.  It would be very useful to learn how to separate living ones from the dead. 

If there is no obvious answer, can anyone speculate on introducing some other organism that would consume the dead and leave the living?

Thanks,
Robert

[Avery louie]

good question...I wonder if there is a difference in buoyancy.  Anyway, there are probably bacteria in there that eat the dead cells.

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[Sebastian S. Cocioba]

Also dead cells use up dissolved oxygen during decomp. So the sooner you get them out the better. I wonder if the skum sucking fish select live from dead cells.

Sebastian S Cocioba

CEO & Founder

New York Botanics, LLC

Sent via Mobile E-Mail 

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

I suspect that the best approach is simply to not let them die in the first place. That is, put them on fresh medium every 3-4 weeks, so they happily keep dividing.

If you really need much higher concentrations for some reason, you may be able to gently spin down the cells, and then put all of them on fresh medium.  Presumably, the reason why they stop growing eventually is because they are producing some byproduct that is limiting their own growth. That is, they are literally poisoning themselves in some way.

I've been contemplating doing some co-culture experiments by ordering a bunch of marine bacteria and growing them together with the dinoflagellates. Roseobacteria may be good candidates, because they tend to be highly abundant in the types of coastal waters where the dinos live, plus some Roseobacteria are known symbionts with other types of algae.

Patrik

[ByoWired]

On Monday, August 27, 2012 4:45:18 PM UTC-4, osazuwa wrote:

We are farming some containers.  It would be very useful to learn how to separate living ones from the dead. 

Dead dogs don't swim.   Can your microbes swim?  Can you control which direction they will swim to by using light, heat, salinity, etc.?  

Just a thought.

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

If they're just growing Pyrocystis, then no, these organisms are not motile. I believe there are some motile dinoflagellates as well, but most other dinoflagellates excrete toxins.

I do wonder if they have some buoyancy control though. It would be interesting to track how the cells migrate in the water column throughout the day. At a minimum, if they're photosynthesizing, they should be creating miniscule amounts of oxygen. I've never noticed any bubbles being formed, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Long shot, but worth checking...

[John Griessen]

On 08/27/2012 05:40 PM, ByoWired wrote:
> Dead dogs don't swim. Can your microbes swim? Can you control which direction they will swim to by using light, heat, salinity,
> etc.?
>

Sounds like an incubator with some custom features for drawing off/skimming the surface while
luring them up would help you make a product stream of them.

[Nathan McCorkle]

Do the living ones only glow when disturbed, or all the time? Do the
dead ones behave differently?

Maybe this would be a good reason to build a cell sorter based on a
photodiode or webcam?

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Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
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