laboratory yeast infections + biohacking

HOW exciting - my U-2 OS culture on woven horsehair has *actually* begun to form smooth, well-adhered, multiple layers of tissue! This means that the cells, instead of hanging out on the fibres by a thin connection, staying rounded in clumps and potentially ready to fall off with any minor disturbance, have fully engaged now with the fibre and will not fall off, but continue to form real tissue. This is a pivotal moment. You can see what I'm talking about:

That's my uber-scientific screen shot of a zoomed-in image of an iPhone photo through the lens of the microscope. The other weaving, which is done just with catgut surgical sutures, has clumps growing on it:

Some of my other cultures, however, didn't fare so well. The silk cloths inoculated with both U-2 OS and SAOS showed signs of a fungal contamination. One of the dishes with contamination was one that I accidentally dipped the tip of my glove in last week - I was hoping I'd be lucky and not see any contamination, but alas. Interestingly, the fungal contaminant is extremely fibrous. I think it's yeast. Still, I euthanized it. Here's what it looked like:

The small, neat broom-like fibres (hyphae) are the fungus while the larger, longer and unruly fibres are the silk.

The second contamination, which I didn't take photos of, appeared to have been a different type of yeast contamination, with globules overtaking the culture completely. From what I've been reading, both contaminations are most likely candida albicans, which in one stage is a mass of hyphae like what we see above (called mycelia), and in another stage is the actual 'yeast' cells (which are pathogenic). So, there we have it: my cultures got a yeast infection and the yeast infection killed the cancer. It's possible the candida came from my own body, either when I was handling the silk barehanded at home in order to clean it before taking it to the lab, or I rubbed against my face or something with my glove while in the lab. Fascinating. Once again, I am (likely) the contaminant. One site explains all this quite well if you're interested in learning more (I am!). Now the question: if candida destroys cancer in vitro, does it do the same in the human body? Is that why we have it naturally present within our bodies in the first place? My friend, Tarsh Bates, whom I met at SymbioticA last year and who was working on her PhD in BioArt, centred all of her research around candida albicans and was doing quite a bit of work with it. I know she was culturing it extensively on agar plates, as well as producing inoculation serum, but I'm not sure if she ever did in culture media as a contaminant or produced mycelium. You can read more about her work, beginning here.

So, I will have to redo the silk cloth experiments and hope no more yeast infections occur.

Can you spot the yeast infection? Look for something round, white and slimy-looking at the top.

Now, another fun thing happened today: a biohacking workshop with an awesome Montreal group of scientists, engineers, bioinformatics researchers and artists that I belong to, called Bricobio. It was a workshop to try to come up with a recipe to make your own culture media. Super interesting. Here are some photos from that workshop:

Jutta and Kevin give an intro to bacteria culture and a worm that eats it, C. elegans.

Some of our kitchen lab equipment and materials for asepsis/sterilization and hacking culture media.

 The recipe my group came up with for making our own culture media was:

• 2 shot glasses of beef broth (protein? sodium)
• 1/3 shot glass of maple syrup (glucose)
• 6 shot glasses dH2O (distilled water to dilute the mixture)
• 1/3 tsp soy flour (protein?)

We mixed that recipe in our sterilized shot glasses and then heated them for 30 minutes in 80˚C water on the stovetop to sterilize the whole media. Then we sterilized a coffee filter in the microwave at 60 seconds and used it to filter the particulate matter out of the media--mainly, the soy flour that didn't dissolve. Then we innoculated the media with saliva to see what bacteria would grow, and placed the glasses of media in a quickly assembled warm water bath, to incubate. I'll have to wait for the results of that because at that point I had to leave the DIY kitchen lab to go to the institutional lab. 

Sterilizing shot glasses in rubbing alcohol, to use as media beakers. True DIY. That's my trusty Tristan behind me.

Chemical engineers and other scientists mixing their own DIY media recipes to test them out.

Note the selective use of lab coats.

Sterilizing our fresh culture media.

Our culture media in the warm water bath after inoculation: one is inoculated with saliva and the other with distilled water to use as a negative control in the testing.

I'll have to follow up with the results of these experiments once I find out what they were, and how well our funky media worked. This, folks, is how a bio nerd spends her Saturdays.