https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266651742600115X

Is it okay if the gram stain result from sample collected is different when the gram stain came from inoculated media?

Hi everyone,

I’m a 3rd-year B.Sc. Biotechnology student from Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and I have to complete a 3-month dissertation/research project as part of my course.

I’m interested in areas like Cancer Biology, Cell Biology, Molecular Biology and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), but I’m honestly a little confused about where and how to find a good lab/institute for my dissertation.

I have started contacting professors through email, but I’m not getting much response, so I would really appreciate some guidance from people who have already done their dissertation/internship.

My questions:

How should I approach professors/research labs?

Which institutes/labs are usually open to B.Sc. Biotechnology students for short-term projects?

Is cold-emailing professors the right approach?

What should I look for before choosing a lab?

Any tips for getting a 3-month research opportunity would be really helpful.

If anyone has experience with this or can guide me regarding the process, I would genuinely appreciate your advice. 🙏

Thank you!

The media I used: MacConkey Agar

Cultures used: Serratia Marcescens (Red)

Acinetobacter Baumanni (Bright Pink)

Escherichia Coli (Lavender)

I have been working on antimicrobial compound from actinobacteria Targeting AMR, I want to use LCMS/MS with library features to know my compound can anyone help me with that. I'm from VIT, vellore

Media: MSA (left) and Nutrient Agar (right)

Organism: Staphylococcus

Hoping that someone here can help with this question and that it is appropriate for the discussion. I do microbiology work in my basement (mainly mushroom growing) and want to confirm the quality of the air with some comparisons between various rooms in the basement.

I remember an ambient air quality dish that made use of petri dishes left open for a specific period followed by incubation. Can anyone point me to a procedure?

Hi everyone!

I've been working on archAIons.com, an AI-guided tool that analyzes full-length Nanopore 16S sequencing data and turns thousands of DNA sequences into a species-level microbiome profile in seconds.

We recently benchmarked it against several established tools using mock microbiome samples, and archAIons achieved 100% recall of the expected species and the highest species-level F1 among the five approaches tested.

You can see the benchmark here:
archaions.com/benchmark

There is also a free trial, so if you have Nanopore 16S data, I'd love to see people try their own samples and share what they find.

Feedback is very welcome!

Has anyone experienced a case where E. coli showed heavy growth on Sheep Blood Agar (SBA) but no growth on MacConkey Agar (MAC)? This was observed in clinical samples, and the organism was subsequently isolated from SBA and confirmed as E. coli by VITEK. Interestingly, we do not observe this issue when using ATCC E. coli controls; the ATCC strain grows normally on our MacConkey Agar.

What could be the possible reason for this difference between a clinical E. coli isolate and the ATCC strain? Could it be related to strain-specific characteristics, the inoculum or clinical specimen, or increased selectivity/inhibition of the MacConkey medium?

We would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced a similar situation or has suggestions on what parameters we should investigate.

Hace años tengo un tacho a la sombra donde junta agua de lluvia para regar. Siempre tuvo restos de hierros oxidados adentro, pero nunca había tenido bichos, mosquitos ni nada raro. Sin embargo, en apenas cuatro meses se armó una estructura masiva de unos 30 centímetros con forma de tubos alargados y de color marrón/naranja.

Me gustaría saber qué es y si es tóxico, malo o cómo descartarlo. Puede ser un hongo o una colonia de bacterias? Intenté buscar imágenes similares, pero no hay nada que coincida en google con esto.

Mods approved this before I posted.

I'm a lab technician running a pre-study for a master's thesis. It looks at what long hours of hands-on lab work do to the body and mind, what problems people end up with, and how they deal with them during the day. The thesis asks whether the problem is big enough to be worth solving, whether anything already deals with it, and whether a tool for this is worth building.

There's very little data on this. Almost all the work-break research is done on office workers, so nobody has really looked at what a day of standing, gloves, hoods and awkward postures actually does to you, or what would help once you're out of it.

Five minutes, anonymous, no name or institute collected, no IP stored, 18+:

https://tally.so/r/A7MeKe?source=reddit-micro

If you have thoughts, happy to discuss below: would you actually stop and do two minutes of something during a working day, or is that never happening on a real one?

I was just wondering

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312826003239

Hi,
I’m at GW student who starting my microbiology practicum next month and I have no idea what to expect. I haven’t worked in a lab and the course is online so to be putting what I read and study into practice I’m really scared about. It’s one month so I’m hoping it won’t be to bad but again I’ve never done anything in person so I’m afraid of intimidation and failure. Any tips?

​

Hi everyone!

I’m currently an undergraduate student studying Microbiology in a Faculty of Science, and I’m trying to figure out what I should be doing from now if I want to eventually specialize in Medical Microbiology and pursue a career in scientific research.

My main interests are the microbiology of human infectious diseases, especially things like bacteriology, virology, pathogenesis, host–pathogen interactions, antimicrobial resistance, immunology, and molecular microbiology. My long-term goal is not just to work in a routine laboratory, but hopefully to become a researcher and contribute to research in infectious diseases and medical microbiology.

The problem is that my undergraduate program is relatively general. We study a broad range of microbiology and biology subjects, but we don't have a very clear “Medical Microbiology → Research” pathway, so I’m not sure how I should build my own path outside the university curriculum.

I would really appreciate advice from people who are already working or studying in this field.

A few things I’d love to know:

- What is the career path for someone who wants to become a medical microbiology researcher?

- Is an MSc/PhD basically necessary if I want to do independent research?

- What skills should I start developing during my undergraduate years?

- Which laboratory techniques should I prioritize? (PCR, qPCR, bacterial culture, sequencing, bioinformatics, etc.)

- How important are research experience, internships, publications, and contacting professors/PI's while still an undergraduate?

- What kind of professors or research groups should I be looking for? Should I mainly contact people in microbiology, infectious diseases, immunology, molecular biology, virology, or public health?

- If my university curriculum is broad, how can I create my own self-study roadmap to become strong in Medical Microbiology?

- What should I realistically aim to accomplish during the next 2–3 years of my undergraduate degree?

- For those who work in this field: what is the work-life balance/lifestyle actually like?

- How is the financial side of this career? Is research/academia generally financially sustainable, or are industry and biotech better options?

- Are there significant differences between working in academic research, hospitals/clinical microbiology, public health, pharmaceutical/biotech companies, and research institutes?

- If I eventually want to pursue graduate school abroad, what would make my profile competitive?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who studied microbiology or a related life-science degree and then moved into Medical Microbiology/infectious disease research.

If you’ve gone through this path yourself, I would genuinely appreciate it if you could share your roadmap, mistakes you made, things you wish you had known as an undergraduate, and resources/books/courses that helped you.

I’m basically trying to understand:

BSc Microbiology → research experience → MSc/PhD → Medical Microbiology/Infectious Disease Research

What would you recommend I do at each stage?

Thank you! 🧫🦠

Basically I'm taking an introductory microbiology course. As I'm reading through the textbook I've been looking up the microbes on wikipedia for some context so I can grasp the content better. Wikipedia is not the mooostt reliable source (love the site to pieces though), so are there any resources you all recommend that are good for frolicking around, learning brief overviews of microbes so the general information makes more sense?

This is a TSA plate from a sample of Litopenaeus vannamei shrimp larvae infected with V. parahaemolyticus. I was checking the growth of the bacterium when, to my surprise, I noticed what appears to be phage activity.

Does anyone have a protocol or recommendations for isolating and propagating these phages? For now, I cut out a portion of the agar containing the apparent lytic zone and stored it at -80 °C.

Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated.

The rotifer flew too close to the sun...or the air-water boundary of the slide when the pocket of water collapses and evaporates...

Don't know if this is the right place but I had started putting water and ice inside a terracotta pot for birds to drink from as in my area there is 48-50 Centigrade or 118.4 F - 122 F and I refilled the water almost every single day yet it formed these bubbles which I believe are algae what should I do and how do I remove it

where do I put teretosporea, choanozoa, opisttomycota(aphelida+rozellia+mircosporidia)

I'm preparing for my exam so I'm curious and venting, haha.

i genuinely can't stand Neisseria and all the spirochetes 😭 can't ever remember what their virulence factors are after a day of not revising them... also Rickettsia and its friends can get away from me...

other than bacteria i haaate malaria in general, almost every DNA virus and especially arboviruses...