Microbiology of a reef

[tibbsy07]

I've seen a bunch of products for increasing the speed of a tank cycle involving the addition of beneficial microbes to a tank. I work in a microbiology lab and have access to all the necessary tools to grow and store microbes. I was wondering if anyone had any personal experience doing this themselves? It'd be nice to be able to sample my current tank and keep small frozen stocks to help future tank cycles. I don't even know if that would really work, but maybe? Does anyone have any suggestions on growing the cultures?

[TheUnfocusedOne]

Why not just try it? Scape off some of your live rock, grow a culture and see what you get. I doubt adding it to a newly setup tank could do any harm.

 

You could probably this do it in your sleep.

[tibbsy07]

Why not just try it? Scape off some of your live rock, grow a culture and see what you get. I doubt adding it to a newly setup tank could do any harm.

 

You could probably this do it in your sleep.

 

Thanks for the input. I'm going to give it a try regardless, I was just thinking of glycerol in the stocks and how that could alter the cycle, if at all.

 

I've got some LR rubble. Maybe I'll take some of the water from the tank, add that LR and see if I can get anything that way.

[saltt]

This is a really neat idea. I love microbiology, I was probably the only one in my class that didn't want the semester to end If you do end up being able to culture the bacteria from your tank, please post results!

[tibbsy07]

This is a really neat idea. I love microbiology, I was probably the only one in my class that didn't want the semester to end If you do end up being able to culture the bacteria from your tank, please post results!

 

I will! It's likely going to be difficult as most microbes from the environment have yet to be cultured successfully in a lab setting, but I'm hoping to at least see what I can do. More important to me is being able to maintain stocks of samples for easier cycling later. I'm wary of rushing things in a tank and I don't want to give the impression that I'm looking to get a quick fix for tanks, especially for those new to the hobby (including myself) but maybe this will be beneficial for setting up quarantine tanks or aiding in new sumps, etc. We'll see!

 

EDIT:

Here's what I'm thinking, and anyone feel free to chime in and tell me if I'm really off base. I was thinking about taking freshly made salt water and add it to some small buckets with some dry dead rock, say 1 gallon in each bucket. Then one bucket will get a dash of ammonia and the other bucket will get a dash of ammonia plus some scraping from my LR rubble. I can monitor the cycle over a week or so and see what we get. Should be relatively simple and an easy way to see if it's actually something worth trying to scrape LR and make stocks.

[JoeDigiorgio]

I'm thinking you could just take your live rock rubble, place some of it in a few small clear containers like mason jars, and dose with vinegar and ammonia for a week or two until you start seeing ammonia levels drop quickly. Once you get a good layer of slime on the sides of the jar, take samples of that and culture from there with more ammonia/vinegar but in a sterile (no live rock) container.

 

Tagging along.

Joe

[Jooce01]

Unless you're the one that owns the lab, make sure you don't get caught bringing in samples from home I work in a micro lab too, and I know that would be a job ending experiment haha.

 

As far as the actual methods, are you planning to isolate some of the bacteria and freeze down the purified culture? Or are you planning to just freeze some of your water/LR scrapings?

[tibbsy07]

Unless you're the one that owns the lab, make sure you don't get caught bringing in samples from home I work in a micro lab too, and I know that would be a job ending experiment haha.

 

As far as the actual methods, are you planning to isolate some of the bacteria and freeze down the purified culture? Or are you planning to just freeze some of your water/LR scrapings?

 

My boss doesn't really care if I do stuff like that here, within reason - my tank is here anyways. As long as my real work gets done, he's fine. I keep my homebrew yeast strains in a small box in our -80. I will be providing all of the reagents myself, with the exception of using some of the glassware from the lab and some pipette tips.

 

I'm still working on getting this going. Work has been pretty busy so this has taken a backseat, but it's on my free-time-to-do list. As far as keeping the stocks, I'm planning on keeping the overall scrapings from the LR, as well as some small LR pieces. Most microbes in the environment can't be cultured for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that lab conditions aren't correct - in many cases the organisms require other organisms and microbes to thrive. Culturing a single organism might be cool, but it won't be beneficial to keep that isolate alone as it wouldn't likely help to seed a reef in the long-run, at least not substantially or not as well as a diverse sample. I also won't be isolating single organisms because that alone could be a full-time job that would require a lot of reagents and tools, something our lab probably isn't equipped for (we're set up for pathogenesis, not microbial ecology), let alone the cost. I'm not about to waste anything in the lab. My boss won't care if I use reusable dishware or use a few pipette tips, but if I start using major reagents and other lab items, he probably would put a stop to it very quickly.