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.
Light has long been known to regulate plant growth. New research from Osaka Metropolitan University has discovered a new mechanism behind this regulation. A team led by Professor Kouichi Soga of the Graduate School of Science ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 13, 2026
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10
Researchers at DTU have developed a new method that can reduce the time needed to find new bacteria for fermentation. They have now identified a bacterium that can be used both for acidification and to increase the vitamin ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 10, 2026
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69
Cell cultures—single layers of cells grown in a small dish—have enabled researchers to study biological growth, develop or test drugs and even discover what causes some diseases. Cell spheroids, 3D versions of cell cultures ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 6, 2026
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8
A surprising observation in the lab has revealed a remarkable ability in Stentor coeruleus, a single-celled organism about one millimeter long. Sometimes nicknamed the "platypus" of microorganisms for its trumpet-like shape, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 2, 2026
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29
Dung beetles remove feces from wild animals in forests and thus inhibit the spread of parasites. They work the dung into the soil and thus supply nutrients to plants. They fulfill this task both in European commercial forests ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 25, 2026
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7
Researchers from the Earlham Institute, in collaboration with the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, have discovered three previously unrecognized lineages of the protist Bodo, each with its own bacterial ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 23, 2026
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7
Cornell scientists have engineered E. coli to act as a sensitive biosensor for monitoring environmental arsenic, a toxic pollutant most notably found in rice paddies in Southeast Asia. Their new study provides a proof of ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 23, 2026
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9
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a rapid and cost-efficient sequencing method that can identify antibiotic resistance within the same working day. The technique, called s5PSeq, measures how bacterial ribosomes ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 16, 2026
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10
A long-standing debate about the evolutionary origin of the world's most widely cultivated "magic mushroom"—Psilocybe cubensis—may now have been settled by scientists from southern Africa and the United States.
Evolution
Mar 10, 2026
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1283
New research from the Technical University of Denmark indicates that the outcome of a resistance measurement may depend on the conditions under which the bacterium is tested. Standard laboratory tests are carried out under ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 10, 2026
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