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.
Scientists at the University of Osaka have developed a novel hydrogel that enables the efficient, three-dimensional (3D) culture of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 12, 2025
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29
To help mitigate climate change, companies are using bioreactors to grow algae and other microorganisms that are hundreds of times more efficient at absorbing CO2 than trees. Meanwhile, in the pharmaceutical industry, cell ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 16, 2025
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65
A research team from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a fully automated "Digital Colony Picker" (DCP). This device identifies and retrieves ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 15, 2025
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23
Researchers at University of Tsukuba proposed a new approach to reveal ecological niches (positions within ecosystems) and evolutionary relationships in nature through large-scale growth analysis of bacteria in strictly regulated ...
Evolution
Sep 29, 2025
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21
Tiny bioreactors, called nanocultures, are opening up new possibilities for microbiome research, especially in harsh and dynamic environments.
Bio & Medicine
Sep 23, 2025
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26
Bacteria have long been a key source of lifesaving antibiotics, but most species cannot be grown in the lab—leaving their therapeutic potential untapped even as multidrug resistance becomes an increasingly urgent threat.
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 14, 2025
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218
Two forgotten bottles in a basement in Frederiksberg containing bacterial cultures from the 1890s have provided researchers at the University of Copenhagen with unique insight into Denmark's butter production history. Using ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 12, 2025
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77
Most bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab—and that's been bad news for medicine. Many of our frontline antibiotics originated from microbes, yet as antibiotic resistance spreads and drug pipelines run dry, the soil beneath ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 12, 2025
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242
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are exploring a new approach to producing food on demand with unconventional materials. Through the Feedstocks for Food Production (FFP) ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 4, 2025
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29
Until now, most microbial cultivation efforts focused on fast-growing organisms that grow in nutrient-rich media. This has left many of the most abundant aquatic microbes, slow-growing oligotrophs that are adapted to low ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 4, 2025
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