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Rescuing contaminated S. cerevisiae culture with antibiotics? - (May/13/2008 )

I am trying to rescue a contaminated S. cerevisiae culture, which I am culturing in SD + Pen/Strep. My idea is that I can hit the contamination with multiple antibiotics to kill off any bacteria in the culture.

Two questions: 1) Is this even a reasonable way to deal with contamination? 2) What antibiotics have been used without any negative effect on yeast? I've read kanamycin has been added to reduce bacterial contamination in yeast cultures. Does anyone know about tetracycline, ampicillin, or chloramphenicol?

Thanks!

-dliu-

QUOTE (dliu @ May 13 2008, 03:17 PM)
I am trying to rescue a contaminated S. cerevisiae culture, which I am culturing in SD + Pen/Strep. My idea is that I can hit the contamination with multiple antibiotics to kill off any bacteria in the culture.

Two questions: 1) Is this even a reasonable way to deal with contamination? 2) What antibiotics have been used without any negative effect on yeast? I've read kanamycin has been added to reduce bacterial contamination in yeast cultures. Does anyone know about tetracycline, ampicillin, or chloramphenicol?

Thanks!



liquid culture or on agar plates? And how heavy is your contamination...sometimes the only thing you can do is put your culture into the autoclave and take a new stock out of the freezer....

My tip would be: take a loop and streak it on an agar plate, incubate and reisolate your S. cer. Maybe you need to do this sometimes, but often this works.

You can try different antibiotics or additives (bengal rose often inhibits bacterial growth, but I dont know the effect on Scer;) in your agar plates or different culture media...
I often use a combination of tetracycline (50mg/L) and streptomycin (100 mg/L) to cultivate soil fungi...but I dont know if this combination effects S. cerevisiae too I had yeasts growing, but was only interested in the anamorphic fungi! Otherwise try to add benomyl (i think 50mg/L), but this knocks out lots of fungi too (worked fine when isolating candida sp.) ....

-gebirgsziege-