Identification of Microbiology Cultures

[Jonathan Bartlett]

I was doing some home microbiology work with the kids, and we took cultures from the surfaces of various things around the house and plated them.  Most wound up just getting yeast, but strawberries grew all sorts of things.  Is there a good reference/methodology for inexpensively identifying microbiological cultures, primarily focused on observational qualities?

Jon

[Nathan McCorkle]

You can probably glean some info from this older thread on species ID:
http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/browse_thread/thread/449334a66c22444a

specifically this post from that thread:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/RJM0pmwiREo/r1hn3bmlAmcJ

(here it is again for convenience):
"""
Patrik D'haeseleer
10/5/11
The old-fashioned approach would be to get out "Bergey's Manual", aka
Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology:

http://www.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bergey%27s_Manual_of_Determinative_Bacteriology
http://www.bergeys.org/pubinfo.html#anchor21298

Here's a great identification flowchart, extracted from the dozens and
dozens of tables in the book:

http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/micro_biology/250/IDFlowcharts.pdf

If you already have a good idea which organism it may be (e.g. B.
subtilis), you may want to get out the big guns, and check Bergey's
Manual of *Systematic* Bacteriology, which will have a lot more
information of specific species phenotypes, beyond merely what is
essential for identifying the species.

Of course, nowadays the gold standard would be to sequence the 16S
rDNA, and use that to identify the organism down to the strain level.
"""

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

The Field Guide to Bacteria is a nice resource as well, and a lot more kid friendly than Bergey's Manual.

Do be really careful with culturing random stuff from the environment though. You can easily wind up magnifying some random pathogen a couple billion fold - including a few nasties that could theoretically kill you, like Aspergillus, Cryptococcus, or even MRSA from your own fingers...

No need to panic - microbiology is a great hobby, you just need to use an appropriate level of caution. Kinda like collecting spiders: mostly harmless, but you should probably know how to recognize a black widow or a brown recluse, and how not to get bitten by them. In the same sort of category as mushroom collecting or herpetology, really...

Patrik