Sunday, May 2, 2010

Woops!

Well, sometimes you drop a tube....or it rolls out of the egg shelf of your fridge!  Anyway my slant of WLP 023 Burton Ale decided to explode on contact with my kitchen floor.  On a lot of my strains I have duplicates as back-ups.  Not for Burton Ale.

So after plucking the cat hair of the remains of the slant I decided to try a little isolation experiment.  I got out one of my blank plates and grabbed a sample of the end of the tube agar.  I streaked it out on the plate.....should be interesting to see what grows up.  If I did a good job streaking it out I should be able to isolate individual microbes on the plate.  Clearly my sample was contaminated, hopefully this will let me re-isolate my yeast strain from any of the riff-raff microbes milling about my kitchen.  I think the biggest problem will be trying to differentiate one yeast strain from another.  My assumption is that despite the contamination the dominant growth on the plate should be the Burton Ale Strain and I should be able to pluck off a representative colony.......We'll see