Greetings people,

I'm isolating bacteria from the water and I was wondering which of the two techniques, streak and spread, could be used? Whilst I know that spread plate method is used in the enumeration of bacteria, could it be used to isolate bacteria or is the streak plate better?

Another thing is that I plan to isolate antibiotic-resistant bacteria from the hospital environment and I have to improvised on some ways to get the bacteria. I plan to use microcentrifuge tubes and cotton buds when swabbing on hard surfaces. Problem is, once I swab a surface, do I leave it cotton bud in the tubes DRY or do I have to place it in liquid environment (say, a broth)? Just afraid it'll dry out and I kill my bacteria.

Thanks in advance. Have a nice day.

broth or pbs would be better, I think? but it depends on the time-frame. I did an experiment once to show junior-high kids bacteria around their schools. I swabbed surfaces, broke off the q-tip into a sterile pbs tube. then went back to the lab and made spread plates. in some cases, they were too thick for enumeration/isolation, but you could do a couple dilutions in case? I used pbs as a transport buffer and the time between the first swab and last plate spread was ~2.5 hours. if it were going to be much longer, I might use broth - something all-purpose like NB?

whatever you do, these bugs you'll be growing are very dangerous so please be careful - that's kind of a scary study