Is anyone here a biologist?

9 years ago

As spring closes in on us, fungus becomes one of the major concerns in lawn care. One option is to apply preventive fungicides, but that has the disadvantage that it indiscriminately kills everything, including beneficial fungi. In recent years, a new class of fungicides - biofungicides has emerged. One such example is Serenade:

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www.agrian.com/pdfs/Serenade_ASO1_Label.pdf

It contains a strain of bacteria (in this case Bacillus Subtilis) which attacks some of the common fungus, not only in turf but in food crops. Overall reviews are good.

Questions:

Would it be feasible to get the beneficial bacteria to multiply in a home environment starting with just a small sample? I found this document: http://2014.igem.org/wiki/images/5/59/LMU_Munich14_Media.pdf which indicates a doubling time of 30 minutes. Does that mean that if you start with 1,000 bacteria, you'd have 2,000 in 30 minutes, 4,000 in one hour, 8,000 in 90 minutes etc?
What would be needed to successfully grow a culture of this bacteria? Sterile bottle, sterile water, add some protein and heat, add a little bit of the bacteria and watch it multiply? Or is there more to it?
Is handling this bacteria safe?

Featured Answer

dchall_san_antonio

9 years ago

Not a biologist, but lack of credentials never stopped me from being intuitive. ...or wrong.

One of the problems with predators is they never populate a place unless/until there is a sufficient quantity of prey not only for the predator but for the family of the predator. For example if you have 1 rose bush with a few aphids, you may never see a ladybug or preying mantis. The aphids are there because there is plenty of rose bush to eat, but not enough to grow the population of aphids for ladybugs. But if you have something like butterfly weed, which attracts aphids like a Walmart attracts people wearing oddball outfits, then you will see ladybugs and preying mantis' in quantity. So if you introduce a population of predatory microbes in your soil, they will thrive as long as they have a food supply. Then the predatory microbes will depopulate.

Usually handling microbes is safe. While they might cause a deadly disease in other microbes or even insects, they likely do not affect mammals. Nature is cool like that.

Sort of similarly, a lot of people try to make compost tea. The original reason to make compost tea was to increase the population of beneficial microbes by 1000x. Under the right conditions of water temperature (between 50 and 65 degrees), with the proper food supply in the water (oatmeal works for some microbes), and plenty of oxygen in the water (often by bubbling air into it), then you can increase the population of some microbes that are adapted to that environment and food supply. This is a far cry from what the compost tea advocates will tell you right up front. What most people end up with is 4-5 gallons of clean compost and all the dirt and dead microbes washed off into the water that was too warm to begin with.

You don't need a clean room to do what you want to do. I'd go for it. Read enough to understand the precise environment needed for the microbes you want to grow. Another thing I read many years ago. A farmer in the Shenandoah Valley wanted to raise rabbits. He said it looked promising for a few months. Then they realized that rabbits only breed like rabbits under ideal conditions. He ended up needing 1800 breeding pairs of rabbits before they produced enough offspring that he could provide a steady supply to his customers. Translation: if you tried to grow poa annua even under ideal conditions, it would get a disease that would wipe it out.

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Comments (6)

reeljake
9 years ago
Bacillus bacteria & beneficial fungi strains are both ingredients in that micro life organic fertilizer you laugh at me about every year. J4 is coming to the dark side!
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User
Original Author
9 years ago
Ok let's not get ahead of ourselves here :-)
User
9 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Putting my microbiologist hat on ...
- Does that mean that if you start with 1,000 bacteria, you'd have 2,000
  in 30 minutes, 4,000 in one hour, 8,000 in 90 minutes etc?
Under IDEAL conditions, yes. For a short time, until they either run out of food or kill themselves with their own waste products.
- What would be needed to successfully grow a culture of this
  bacteria? Sterile bottle, sterile water, add some protein and heat, add a
  little bit of the bacteria and watch it multiply? Or is there more to
  it?
Nope ... to get the sort of population explosion you seem to want you have to have some way of removing the bacterial metabolites that stifle growth. Typically products like this are produced with a flow-through system, a bio-reactor, that continuously aerates, adds new nutrients and keeps waste products minimized.

And you need to know how to work with sterile technique or the culture will get overgrown with other bacteria, mostly Pseudomonas.
- Is handling this bacteria safe?
How good is your immune system?

ADDING: I normally don't worry about bacteria, but when you have large quantities of them in pure cultures they can be much more hazardous than the ones in small quantities in the wild.
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User
Original Author
9 years ago
Thank you very much for your response. It's exactly what I was looking for.

What I am trying to accomplish is to use less of the product to reduce cost per app. So if the application rate is 1oz of product, I'd like to use 1/32 of an ounce and allow the population to double every 30 minutes for 3 hours to get the same amount of bacteria as if I had used 1oz. Then dump that into the 4 gallon sprayer and spray immediately.

Serenade lists the "amount" of bacteria inside the bottle at about 1% by weight. If I further dilute my 1/32 of an ounce of product in say half a gallon of water and add nutrients and heat, would that be enough volume of water to prevent the bacteria from killing itself via waste byproducts in 3 hours? I don't need to create a "concentrated" culture, I just need to increase the bacteria count in a fairly dilute solution.

What kind of protein would be suitable food for the bacteria? What about something like beef broth?

Also, this just came to me, how does the bacteria survive spraying in chlorinated water? I'll have to read the bottle label but I can't see them requiring distilled water to spray.
desirous
9 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
j4c11, this stuff smells exactly like bread yeast. I had similar thoughts as I was applying it last summer. I'd try flower, and small amount of molasses and lukewarm water.