Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm currently doing a science fair project that involves growing cheese and yogurt cultures on a petri dish and subjecting them to various antibiotics. I know how to measure the zone of inhibition and how to place the antibiotic disks on the bacteria, but I don't know where I could get the bacteria strains or how to grow them on the dish.
Bacteria:
L. Heleviticus
L. Bulgaricus
L. Acidophilus
S. Thermophilus
PS: This is pretty urgent as my procedures are due in 5 days

Hey there. So glad you reached out!

Here is a link that will hopefully help with these questions:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ml#summary

Check under Materials and Procedures for answers to your specific queries. Please review this information and let us know if you have further questions!

Elizabeth

Thank you for the response, but I am looking more to grow only one culture on a dish rather than have multiple growing at once. My experiment will be what each strain of bacteria does rather than what happens to the whole yogurt.

Good morning!

It sounds like you are looking to purchase cultures for your experiment. You can check out this website http://www.atcc.org/. They sell all sorts of bacterial strains and anything that is listed as a biosafety level 1 can be purchased without an problem for school science projects. I would highly suggest that you also take a look at some information (if you haven't already) on Science buddies for some additional help in growing your cultures. There are multiple links on this page https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ques.shtml. Please check them out before starting your project. In addition to reading this information, I would also suggest talking to your science teacher and finding out if they are willing to give you some hands on help in starting your cultures.

Good luck with your project! I hope this information is helpful, please let us know if we can answer additional questions.

Nikki