Cas' Microbiology Blog

There is fungus among us!

We left some fungal plates out. Streptomycin to select against bacterial growth. We’ve got some of these cute little fuzzy guys. The plates are colored with Rose Bengal, giving it the pink color.

But then we also saw that green monstrosity

He is full of a bunch of funky things. My mycologist friend thinks the droplets are Buller’s drops, a mode of reproduction. It allows fungal spores to defy gravity and be launched into time and space. More fungus, more fun!

Our in-house microbiology expert concludes the are Penecillium notatum Conidia spores, given their characteristic broom shape.

As you can see, we had a bit of a an oopsie in the lab. S. cerevisiae contaminated with what appeared to be (and smelled like) some kind of enteric.

The gram stain showed mostly purple (but some pink with the nuclear material stained purple instead, very cool!) And orange rods, that appear to have some sort of filamentous or pseudohyphae formation.

Alas, those rods are much too long to be any enteric we know, and they have no gram status. Hence why they’re orange instead of purple or pink.

A close up of the capsule-like membrane in question:

this bread tiny