AMD + ATI

AMD has announced that the company and ATI will join together. Presumably ATI will no longer manufacture the chipset for Intel based products, but who knows? Anyway, I'm more curious about how they'd rename their new(?) company... "AT&A" ?!

2 days after subculturing Helicobacter pylori

The subcultured HP seems to have formed some visible colonies now, and since 5 days incubation looks too long for them (not quite sure though), I'll subculture them tomorrow (i.e. 3 days) again so that their colonies may not be too sticky.

Day 5

Unfortunately, after opening the microaerobic jar I noticed that some of the agars had been contaminated by other bacteria. I was using BHIYE agar (x2), BHIYE-chocolate agar (x 2) and CHBHP agar (x 2), among them BHIYE agars were heavily contaminated by unknown species. I'll check what they are with Gram's stain some time. Apparently I do need antibiotics for inhibiting those contaminants. I'll add vancomycin, polymyxin and trimethoprim into the agars next time.

Day 3

I can see some spots on CHBHP; must be Helicobacters. That's quicker that I've imagined!

Culturing Helicobacter pylori

As we've expected, my columbia agar plate and defibrinated horse blood arrive today, so now I can get onto work...but wait! How come the expiry date of the two bottles of horse blood are this weird?? "20/05/06" and "??/??/07" ...anyway, I'll check what the hell is wrong with this next week, but I just use one of them for making my CHBHPs, and inoculate the Helicobacter type strain and incubate them as soon as possible. I feel the colonies quite sticky, just like the feeling that I felt when Campys are dying...but I hope this won't be true...

Helicobacter pylori arrived

The one of the biggest challenging bacterium I'd manage finally arrived today. This extremely fastidious bug - Helicobacter pylori is such a fragile thing that anyone who handle it would need to spend more care on it: 1. Need highly nutritious media. Probably BHI (Brain Heart Infusion) or Columbia media is a choice. 2. Like other microaerobes, Helicobacters also need blood (or equivalent) to quench the damage from oxygen and its derivatives (free radicals, hydrogen peroxide, etc). So defibricated sheep blood or horse blood would be unavoidable. 3. Due to its slow growth, I'll have to incubate it much longer than other genus. Roughly 3-7 days. 4. During the long term incubation, contamination should be an issue; especially I'm also handling other enterbacters, which are major competant cultures of Helicobacters. Suitable antibiotics would also be required. 5. Last but not least, need to keep high humidity. It's reported that a water activity of at least 0.95 is required for its growth. Under such a high humidity, fungi would be a big concern. (So germicides have to take into account...) What I've decided to use for the media is Columbia Horse Blood HP (shortly CHBHP), which is reported to be superior for culturing Helicobacter pylori in Japan (fast growth, low contamination). The problem is... the columbia agar and horse blood we've ordered haven't arrived yet...(actually the HP culture was supposed to be arrive tomorrow, but who knows it arrives TODAY...) Now here is a big dillema. This afternoon I was told that the two stuff would arrive tomorrow. So, should I wait till tomorrow so that I can use the freshly-made CHBHP, or should I culture and freeze the cells today with BHI (Brain Heart Infusion) so that those cells wouldn't transform into coccoid form or even die? Eventually I decide to postpone one day and see if the reagents would arrive tomorrow.