Question: what is the chemostat you work with?

Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:

I’m really glad someone asked about the chemostat! Well done!

When bacteria grow they have three stages:
1. growing where they are doubling in number every few minutes
2. they reach ‘steady state’ where they stay at the same number as they grow because the number dying equals the number growing
3. they start running out of food, or poisoning themselves with their waste products

The best stage to study bacteria is stage one, before they start running out of nutrients at all. The chemostat allows us to pump in new bacteria, and we also pump out old bacteria. This means that we study bacteria in stage one for as long as we want, without any of the effects of stage 2 or 3. This is quite exciting for our research. We also get to look at changing different things like the amount of oxygen we provide, or adding different nutrients to the bacteria and seeing how they grow

The possibilities are endless with this piece of equipment, so it’s very exciting! We are already getting lots of results from it which is great.

It is very complicated to set up though – for the first 6 months of using it we had to keep changing how we set it up because things kept going wrong! We now have a lovely checklist made so we don’t miss anything out!