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.
Microbiologists from Stellenbosch University in South Africa have discovered a previously unknown bacterial genus within the phylum Acidobacteriota. It is the first genus from this phylum to be described from Southern Africa.
Molecular & Computational biology
Jul 8, 2026
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9
A new genetic screening method allows researchers to efficiently modulate individual genes across entire tissues and provides new insights into human development. The research, published in eLife, is described as a landmark ...
Biotechnology
Jul 7, 2026
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9
An international team, including the University of Tokyo, has created a sensor inspired by the lateral line in fish—their "sixth sense" organ—which measures the pulse of lab-grown 3D heart tissue (cardiac organoids). The ...
Biotechnology
Jul 5, 2026
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16
When living cells grow, divide or respond to drugs, they give off tiny amounts of heat that offer information about what the cells are doing. But because these heat signals are so vanishingly small, they have traditionally ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 16, 2026
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8
Before testing new therapies in animals, researchers now have a more efficient starting point—lab-grown canine muscle cells that can help identify what works and what doesn't.
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 12, 2026
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34
A team of Israeli scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has developed a novel method to significantly lower the production costs of cultivated meat. The new study demonstrates that preloading plant-derived cellulose ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 2, 2026
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Cells are typically studied outside the body under controlled laboratory conditions. However, conventional flat cell culture methods do not fully reproduce the complex three-dimensional environments that cells experience ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 1, 2026
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9
A new advance in animal husbandry involving a popular aquarium fish should speed the pace of discovery in laboratory studies of host-microbe interactions, researchers report. The new findings by researchers from the University ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 1, 2026
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7
You've probably seen slimy mats of brownish green clinging to rocks in streams or on lake beds, and perhaps not given it another thought. But George Mason University's Rosalina Stancheva Christova has. For more than 20 years, ...
Ecology
Jun 1, 2026
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11
A new study shows crop species, and not soil type, primarily determines the beneficial functions provided by root-associated microbes. In the study, soil obtained from across nine UK locations was used to cultivate six key ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 28, 2026
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