Culturing specimens is a laboratory method for maintaining and propagating viable biological material—typically microorganisms, cells, or tissues—under controlled environmental conditions to enable growth, survival, or functional analysis. It involves inoculating a specimen into or onto a defined growth medium (solid, liquid, or semi-solid) optimized for nutrient composition, pH, osmolarity, and selective agents, followed by incubation at specific temperature, gas composition, and humidity. This method allows enrichment, isolation of pure cultures, quantification, phenotypic characterization, and downstream applications such as antimicrobial susceptibility testing, genomic analysis, and functional assays, while requiring strict aseptic technique and, when relevant, biosafety containment procedures.
Cultivated meat aims to produce meat from animal cells in the laboratory without needing to raise a living animal for meat production. It has been proposed as a potentially more sustainable alternative to conventional meat ...
Biotechnology
Sep 2, 2026
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Scientists have often wondered about species that are unique to Antarctica. But the focus has mainly been on animals, like feathery penguins. CIRES researchers wanted to dig deeper—into the soils—believing tiny organisms ...
Ecology
Aug 31, 2026
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18
Algae have a habit of turning up where they're not wanted. They coat your swimming pool in green gunk, cling to rocks at the beach and even make headlines when they take over prominent reservoirs, such as the White House ...
Biotechnology
Aug 31, 2026
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7
Engineers have developed a strain of a common bacterial species that can feed exclusively on the three major sugars present in corn stalks. While the new multiple-sugar-consuming strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas putida ...
Biotechnology
Aug 10, 2026
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13
From routine surgeries to cancer treatment, modern medicine depends on drugs that can fight infections caused by microbes such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. But some microbes are becoming resistant to the drugs ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 5, 2026
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139
How readily a cell divides and how well it survives are fundamental to life, shaping everything from organ size to the body's ability to withstand disease. That combination, known as cell fitness, isn't the same for everyone. ...
Cell & Microbiology
Aug 4, 2026
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14
For cells to function properly, they must produce the right amount of each protein. It is a delicate balance: Both too little and too much can compromise essential cellular functions. A team from the University of Geneva ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 22, 2026
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13
Biomedical engineers at Brown University have developed a fully automated workflow that simplifies and accelerates the preparation of bacterial samples for genetic sequencing. The method, dubbed Pathogen2Read, streamlines ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 21, 2026
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5
The Space Aquaculture Project at Okayama University of Science is an ambitious research initiative aimed at cultivating fish and crustaceans on the moon and Mars, which are expected to serve as food production bases for future ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 13, 2026
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11
Phylo-Plex, a new computational method, has been developed by Wellcome Sanger Institute scientists and their collaborators to allow cost-effective and scalable DNA sequencing of pathogens in laboratories with limited resources. ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 9, 2026
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