Co-culture – Blind date for bacteria?

Most of the marine world is still unexplored although its huge biodiversity may offer great opportunities for exploitation, especially pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, most of the microorganisms which show potential for drug generation are not culturable in the laboratory, and this is true for 99.9% of the oceanic micro-world population. This problem is addressed in the MaCuMBA project, funded by the EC, which aims to find new isolation, culture and measurement techniques for those types of cells. It is believed that co-culture of those microorganisms can be the key factor for growing them ex situ. This seminar will give a quick introduction to the idea of co-culture, existing techniques already providing promising results in this field and two devices which will be developed during my PhD for overcoming some of the drawbacks of current techniques. Problems encountered during fabrication of the devices will be discussed as well as ways of overcoming them. In addition, a brief introduction will be given to some other devices under development.