Any microbiologists that can help?

[Mistress Lilith]

Any microbiologists that can help??

A 'small' project for uni involves forming a method for isolating Pseudomonas sp.(psychrotrophic) and putting this into practice. The problem: our demonstrator insists that we aren't marked on the actual experiment itself as it is a "if you're lucky you'll be able to isolate the organism" kind of experiment. Has anyone tried an experiment as such? Any suggestion on something that'll work and enable that i DO have a species of Ps??

 

[iansmith]

First you have to obtain a sample. For psychotrophes, soil or water from the artic or a cold environment would raise your chances of isolating a cold adapted microorganism. The second step would be to culture your sample using selective medium for Pseudomonas such as decibed in this http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=203776. The organism should also be grown in the range for growth of psychotrophes and streaking for isolation should be used. The next would be to confirm that your isolated bacteria are Pseudomnas by doing morphology and biochemical test, the bergey's manual of Systematic Bacteriology will have the standard results for the test and it is the best reference. Alternatively, 16S rRNA sequencing could be done and BLAST search would help to identify the isolated bacteria.