Coscinodiscus sp.

Strain Specific FAQs:

Q:       We received the Diatom starter cultures yesterday. I had a few questions:

1.      We noticed that all the culture tubes had a line of sediment where the diatoms seemed to have stuck to the walls. Is this normal?

2.      We prepared the L1 medium using the L1 media kit and artificial sea water matched to the salinity of the culture media which we measured to be 3.2%. We autoclaved the media after preparation, as instructed by the NCMA L1 media recipe. However, on cooling down the media looked cloudy today morning. Is this a known problem? Would filtering the solution through a 0.2 um filter work better instead?

A:       The sizes on the cultures can vary by as much as 30 microns due to being in culture for so long and by the bore size of the pipette used to inoculate the sub-sets.  The racks that the two Coscinodiscus were inoculated from only contain the 1 culture of Coscinodiscus so I feel confident that there was no cross contamination in the starter cultures.  We will be more than happy to send another set of starter cultures if you like.  I have included NCMA serv. acct. in the email.  Please contact them to arrange shipping if this is the route you want to take.