Modern genetic techniques allow these to be sampled far more effectively than by the old approach of culturing on agar plates.
The reason to think Merck may succeed, argues Tim Anderson of Sanford Bernstein, a research firm, is that it has found a way to make biosimilars by culturing them inside yeast cells.
Culturing them together in this way allowed them to encourage each other's growth by chemical signals through the medium.The firm's success is not, however, quite as clear-cut as it seems.
In the past, bacteria-detection researchers have tried to exploit this specificity using conventional techniques: culturing samples, infecting them, and then testing for by-products of bacterial death.
Culturing freshwater fish such as tilapia, for example, is often much greener than raising the marine species that have been the industry's mainstay until now.Furthermore, Kjell Bjordal, managing director of the EWOS Group, a company that makes fish food for farming, points out that aquaculture has relatively low carbon emissions.
And when she tried culturing micro-organisms from leaves taken from the various branches she showed that those from branches without ants were more heavily infected with known plant pathogens.The reason, she discovered, was on the ants' legs.
The traditional method of production for such proteins, which involves culturing large volumes of mammalian-derived cells and extracting their contents, costs about $150 a gram.
When the utensil was removed, Dr Zhu decided to try culturing the tissue that came out with it, to see whether there were any stem cells there.Waste not, want notTo his delight, the extracted tissue thrived and grew, and many of the cells in the resulting culture did indeed contain proteins known to be characteristic of neural stem cells.
Intercytex's second approach seems to involve culturing the dermal papilla cells with proteins that take part in signalling during the process that creates hair.The long and short of it is that being able to multiply these cells while preserving their efficacy opens the way for unlimited supplies of head hair.
Culturing bacteria is time-consuming, and many bacteria do not thrive in captivity.
By culturing these cells, and putting them together as they would come together naturally, Dr Sharpe has managed to form an artificial primordium.To do so, he starts with human neural stem cells (these are undifferentiated cells similar to those found in embryos, and which are capable of developing into a variety of cell types).
