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The Laboratory for Extraordinary Microbes
Cultivarium, a small nonprofit, is building tools to grow and engineer peculiar organisms—and then giving their discoveries away for free.
In 1881, Robert Koch showed that cells grew better when incubated “in a broth composed of fresh beef serum or meat extract.” He used this recipe, and modifications thereof, to discover the microbes that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. That’s the year Eberhard Neumann at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry employed short “electric impulses” to punch holes into cells, allowing DNA to slip inside. For the 106 microbes that Cultivarium has directly worked on, the database also lists data on their preferred growth conditions—temperatures, media, doubling times, plasmid origins for genetic engineering, and availability from strain banks.
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