sterilization - media in dry air oven (Nov/05/2008 )

This is a pretty basic question.
What happens if by mistake the bacterial culture media was put in a dry air oven instead of autoclaving? will components be degraded? will it get dehydrated?

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what temperature????

But usually its scorched and it will have not the correct properties anymore....I would re-do it

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160 C. actually, a new colleague did this by mistake and he poured the media into the agar plates. The media was mannitol salt agar which is rare and precious here. Surprisingly, the staph isolates did grow on subculturing. Can a less water content or a degraded component affect the characters of bacteria?

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it depends on the bacteria ability to withstand high osmotic conditions and the initial osmotic pressure of the media itself.

And yes, high osmotic conditions in E coli and yeast does change both its physic characteristic (size) and in E.coli the solutes/amino acid concentration of the cytosol. High osmostic concentration do change the behaviour of some proteins and does to a degree effect gene expression.

However will any of this be important to you? I don't know.

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If the bugs grew, then you can't have done too much damage. The plates will be dehydrated, but as long as there was enough water, the bugs can grow (as they appear to have done).

Hopefully, your colleague has learned his lesson, and won't do it again!

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It mainly depends on the type of bacterial culture media that you use.
And the ability of mediumto withstand the osmotic pressure.
I think it would be degraded!

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saranya.l
Blaze Infotech

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Thank you all for your help

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