Tony, Fowler's experiment

[Guest guest]

You don't have a benchtop centrifuge / microcentrifuge, do you? I

just looked at used ones and they are not cheap, bout USD$300 for the

cheapest used one I could find in 2 minutes:

http://www.used-line.com/c5523858s4-Eppendorf_5414.htm

Anyway, if you felt like it you could probably test Fowler's on non-

growing bacteria. It would only use up a miniscule amount of your

Fowler's. All you do is take a colony of staph epi or whatever bug

you want, resuspend it in a beaker of saline. That virtually stops

their metabolism since there's no nutriment. Pour half of that beaker

into one tube and half into another. One tube is a control. Treat the

other tube with Fowler's for maybe 6 hours. Then plate out both tubes

on nutrient agar to see if a bunch of the treated ones died, compared

to the control (you count the colonies).

Problem is you have to get rid of the Fowler's before plating.

Otherwise you won't get colonies, even if they are still alive. The

Fowler's will inhibit their growth into colonies even if it doesn't

kill them. The only way I know how to get it out, is to centrifuge

the bugs. That gets all the bugs into a solid pellet, so that you can

pour off the fluid containing Fowler's. Then you would redisolve them

in saline and pellet them again, a few more times, to get rid of any

Fowler's. (And you gotta do the same with the control.) Maybe there's

some other way to do it, such as filtering.

I want to get me a centrifuge... probably will at some point.