{"id":150,"date":"2016-12-22T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/?p=150"},"modified":"2018-04-30T09:21:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T08:21:46","slug":"christmas-spores-merry-christmas-from-the-react-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/christmas-spores-merry-christmas-from-the-react-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas spores. Merry Christmas from the REACT team"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Christina Julius<\/p>\n

When we think about bacteria, we tend to think of spoiled food and illness. But not all bacteria are bad- they are the most diverse organisms on the planet! \u00a0They are important for a range of biochemical processes, such as helping cattle to digest grass and producing cheese from milk. To study bacteria, we can grow bacteria into colonies on plates containing a media (agar) of essential nutrients and chemicals. \u00a0We can also use bacteria to make some fascinating and festive images to wish you all a Merry Christmas.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

For making these images I had a lot of help finding strains and media. I want to thank all my colleagues at CBCB (Newcastle University)- especially Yulia Yuzenkova, Amber Riaz-Bradley, Charles Winterhalter, Kaveh Emami, Fernando Santos Beneit, Valeria Verrone and Olga Chrobak.<\/p>\n

The bacteria behind the photos<\/p>\n

1. Christmas Tree:\u00a0Synechocystis\u00a0sp. PCC 6803.\u00a0Cyanobacteria are usually green due to photosynthesis but here it seems that the presence of a lot of glucose (food) lead the strain to turn slightly yellow.
\nChristmas Baubles: \u00a0Streptomyces spp. Streptomyces are actinobacteria and the natural source of many antibiotics e.g. streptomycin, tetracycline or chloramphenicol.<\/p>\n

2. Merry Christmas:\u00a0E. coli\u00a0MG1655.\u00a0E. coli is the most commonly used model organism in microbiology.
\nStars:\u00a0E. coli MG25113.\u00a0This strain is genetically altered and contains GFP (green fluorescent protein). The addition of arabinose induces the expression of GFP.<\/p>\n

3. Snowman: Streptomyces coelicolor M145.\u00a0This Streptomyces produces the antibiotic actinorhodin which diffuses into the agar and dyes it blue. At prolonged incubation, the cells will start to produce spores as a survival mechanism, which would turn the snowman white.<\/p>\n

4. Small\u00a0Christmas Tree:\u00a0Klebsiella pneumoniae.\u00a0An opportunistic pathogen that causes urinary or respiratory tract infections and is often transmitted via hospital equipment or staff. Many strains also have a multitude of antibiotic resistances. The patients from which the strains were isolated suffered from reoccurring bacteremia (blood infection).
\nChristmas baubles: E. coli.The strain here is not a model organism from the lab but a blood isolate from the hospital. Some pathogenic strains of the otherwise harmless species E.coli can cause very severe conditions. Often they are multi-resistant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Christina Julius When we think about bacteria, we tend to think of spoiled food and illness. But not all bacteria are bad- they are the most diverse organisms on the planet! \u00a0They are important for a range of biochemical processes, such as helping cattle to digest grass and producing cheese from milk. To study […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-christina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}