Path: cottonwood.bio.indiana.edu!user
From: skuerst at bio.indiana.edu (Scott Kuersten)
Newsgroups: bionet.celegans
Followup-To: bionet.celegans
Distribution: world
Subject: Worm food
Message-ID: <-091194110810 at cottonwood.bio.indiana.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Biology, Indiana University
There was talk on the newsgroup a few weeks ago about worm food and how people could get large amounts of it. This is an interesting topic for me since I do a lot of worm biochemistry and thus use a lot of E. coli. In the past I have utilized a 100-L fermentor in our department to grow NA22, concentrate it down to a paste and freeze aliquots in small (7ml) weigh boats. Surprisingly, there has been a few comments made to me that this method does not work! The reason being that the cells lyse when they are f
rozen and one ends up with E. coli extract instead of intact cells. This does not seem to happen to any significant extent. I have been using frozen coli for the past few years with great success. The worms grow healthy and quite dense and are capable of clearing the media if left alone to do so (they should not be able to do this if the bacteria are lysed). Granted I have never done any experiments to test how intact the cells are, but the fact remains that I have been mak!
ing C. elegans extracts for about
I am posting this article to see how interested people are in acquiring worm food. Recently, the fermentor in our department died and I have had to grow worm food on a continuous basis (very unpleasant!). Because this is such a time consuming process I have been looking for a commercial supplier of E. coli paste. I have found a few potential sources that can supply upwards of about 10 kg of paste for about $2000-$3000. To me this does not seem overly excessive since 10 kg is almost a lifetime supply fo
r little old me! Anyway, since this amount of paste is essentially more then I can use I was hoping there might be some people out there who would be interested in sharing some of the cost if it were determined that the paste was of good quality and free of contaminants (which I have been assured that it will be). Please email me directly since I don't read the newsgroup nearly as much as I should. Thanks.
scott
skuerst at bio.indiana.edu
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