| In order to guard against contaminating the clean room, in which bacterial cultures are started, incoming personnel must cover their shoes with these disposable covers, as they enter the room. |  |
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Once an individual strain is selected for production it is grown in a "shake flask", incubated in a New Brunswick G-24 environmental shaker (shown on the right side of the photo below). After initial growth is achieved, it is checked for purity on a culture plate like the one at left, which shows one of Alken-Murray's newest commercial strains, Bacillus mojavensis AMH 100. As you can see, all colonies look alike (different sizes but the same shape, color and other traits), indicating purity of the shake flask growth. If the plate showed other morphologies, the shake flask growth would be discarded and the frozen stock culture would be streaked to verify its purity and then a new shake-flask culture would be started, once purity was again assured. If frozen stock is contaminated, then fresh culture will be obtained from ATCC or ARS, where strains are kept to prevent loss due to power failure on-site. |
| In the left corner of the picture at the right is the MICROSCOPE used to examine the growth stages of the inoculum. This helps verify freedom from contaminant bacteria. The large appliance next to it is an ULTRA-FREEZER, which maintains stock cultures between -60° and -70°F. To the right is an AUTOMATIC SHAKER which aerates the initial culturing stages. |  |
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In the CLEAN ROOM, (pictured at left) media is being prepared for growing the final inoculum stage |
