Contamination Club
@ContamClub
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One of the greatest discoveries in microbiology came from contamination. Join the club and share yours here 🦠🧫 logo by @sylsyltong
Joined August 2019
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On this day in 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from holiday and started sorting through some petri dishes containing Staphylococcus that he had left on his bench whilst away. 🏖️🧫
One of the plates caught his eye, and made for the ultimate ContamClub submission:
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Today is Alexander Fleming's birthday. He had the most famous and important contamination in history that led to hundreds of millions of lives saved worldwide.
Happy birthday Prof Fleming! 🎉🎈
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We got sent this contaminant on an EMB agar plate 😳
This one is kind of terrifying, any ideas what it could be?
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🍜🦠 NOODLOCOCCUS UPDATE 🦠🍜
The longer we leave the plates, the cooler Noodlococcus looks 😍
The small single colonies are now looking like spaghetti hoops
Nanopore sequencing happening on Friday! 🧬
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Celebrating 10,000 followers! 🎉
Thank you to everyone who enjoys looking at contaminants as much as we do - keep sharing your contams! 🦠🧫🍄🎊
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This is an amazing contaminant that
@HaleyZubyk
found on her plate!
We think it looks like a carpet 😮😍
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Check out these INSANE contaminants from
@PseudoNic
1st is on MacConkey agar, 2nd is on Peptone Iron agar 🧫
These are just beautiful 😍
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Anyone know what could cause this?
These spots of E. coli were left for a few days on the bench and the centre of each spot has turned brown and pitted. Never seen anything like it 🤨
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Been a while since our last Noodlococcus update 🍜🦠
These are colonies from some spread plates that we left at room temperature for a week after 2 days of 30°C incubation.... They started out as normal, small, round colonies and then developed into these 😍🧫
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Ladies and gentlemen...
From the first read it appears Noodlococcus belongs to the genus Kocuria (from the phylum Actinobacteria). Closest match is Kocuria rhizophila.
Is Noodlococcus a new species?
....we'll investigate further with more genome data 🧬
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🚨CONTAM CALENDAR🚨
Featuring some of the best submissions from the ContamClub community 🧫🦠
Make 2022 a contaminant filled year with the
#ContamCalendar
🗓️
Available very soon - stay tuned!!
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This year we will be hosting the first World Cup of Contaminations 🏆
Submitted contaminants will go head to head in Twitter polls and the overall winner will be whole genome sequenced! 🧬
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We're a day late but happy
#InternationalMicroorganismDay
!
Let's celebrate all the amazing microorganisms waiting to be discovered like our very own Noodlococcus 🍜🦠
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1 year ago today we found Noodlococcus growing on
@pRobM91
's BHI plate, leading us to create this account
We've loved seeing all your cool contaminants over the last year and look forward to many more! Happy
#Noodleversary
🍜🦠🧫
Anyone know what this is? Grew on
@pRobM91
's 11 day old BHI plate...
We've called it Noodlomyces for now 🍜
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Fun fact about this year's ContamCalendar - it was created entirely from a hospital bed after I spent 7 weeks in hospital following heart surgery.
This surgery was actually partially related to both contamination and the ContamCalendars.... 📆🫀🩺🦠
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This contaminant on
@roscobacterium
's BHI plate looks like it's trying to shout something at us 😵
Anyone know what this could be?
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Check out this contamination on BHI agar 🧫
First pic is from last week, second pic is today - it has formed a bridge to the lid of the petri dish 😮
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Look who has returned! We found a Noodlococcus-looking contaminant on
@roscobacterium
's old BHI plate! 🍜🧫🦠
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Introducing the ContamCalendar 2024 📆🦠🧫🍄 on sale tomorrow! Loved putting this together, can't wait for you guys to get your hands on this
💥 Retweet, like, and follow
@ContamClub
for your chance to win one 💥
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This was shared on reddit (sent to us by
@imanoctothorpe
) - someone had contamination in their CHO cell culture. Looks absolutely terrifying 😳 can anyone ID it?
Reddit thread here:
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🍜 MAJOR UPDATE 🍜
After leaving the sequencing run for a couple of hours,
@Scalene
was able to get 15x coverage...
Then
@samstudio8
worked his assembly magic on the reads to produce a 2.7 Mb contig... Noodlococcus has officially been genome sequenced!
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🦠🍜💥 GIVE AWAY TIME 💥🍜🦠
We are giving away FIVE sets of these exclusive Noodlococcus stickers!
Just like and retweet to enter!
Winners will be randomly selected and announced on 13th December.
(50p coin for size reference)
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Even the contaminations know it's Christmas!
@StanleyHoBio
's BHI soft agar has become a snow globe ❄️🔮
Very fitting for the last contamination in our lab for 2019! Hope you're all off for Christmas now too 🎅
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It is estimated that the antibiotic penicillin has since saved over 200 million lives worldwide 🌍 it also sparked the golden age of antibiotic discovery
This world changing drug all came about thanks to a contamination that caught the eye of a keen microbiologist. 🧫🦠🍄
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Found these goofy looking contaminants on one of our undergrad student's BHI plate 🐸
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Check out this AMAZING contamination on a TSA plate found by
@brdigette
🧫
Does anyone know what causes that layering? It's beautiful 😍
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We continue to celebrate microbial contaminants here and love seeing what people find growing.
Contaminants can be beautiful and interesting - and you never know, maybe your next contaminant could change the world! 🦠🧫💛
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September in the ContamCalendar is a couple of months too late to the Barbenheimer trend 💣💥💖
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🚨CONTAM CALENDAR 2023🚨
AVAILABLE NOW ➡️ ⬅️
We hope you'll love this year's
#ContamCalendar
featuring some more of our favourite submissions from the ContamClub community 🗓️🧫🦠
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Someone on reddit had this green-hair-looking mould grow on their spaghetti in the fridge 🍝🌿
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Thank you for 6000 followers!!! We have loved receiving hundreds of photos of your wonderful contaminants - zoom in below and see if you can find your favourite 🔎🦠
And speaking of your favourite contaminants... exciting things coming soon...
#ContamCup2021
🏆 👀
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These contaminants on
@ronakb_
's LB agar plate look like pig snouts 🐽
Anyone know what they are?? 🐷
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The most famous contaminant in history!
In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the mould he was working with produced a substance that could kill many common bacteria. He called this new, exciting substance "mould juice". Only after a couple of months did he name it penicillin.
#WorldAntibioticAwarenessWeek
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not a contamination but oh my, what a beautiful specimen 😍
I present the most beautiful CFU I've seen, which reminds me of a rosette window! It came from a Red-tailed hawk! 😍
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Incredible mould contaminating some cheese! 😍
Um bom dia pro
@mateusdosfungos
, será que tá bom este cream cheese ainda? Dá pra usar né?
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We have just hit 4000 followers!
Thank you to all the cool contaminants out there and thank you to all of you for joining the Contam Club ❤️
Stay noodle-y
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We inoculated some BHI broth with a single colony of Noodlococcus and grew it overnight in a shaking incubator...
It has grown as a clump of Noodlococcus despite shaking 😮 we've never seen anything like this before
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For my last ever lab meeting at the University of Birmingham,
@freyaallen__
made some incredible Noodlo-cake-us! 🍜🦠🎂
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This contaminant seems to be producing an antibiotic and killing the Caulobacter on
@WanassaB
's PYE agar (+ tetracycline) plate 😍😮
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@Scalene
@samstudio8
ANI suggests that Noodlococcus is a new species 😮
We used the orthoANIu algorithm to compare Noodlococcus to Kocuria species with highly similar 16S sequences.
The suggested species boundary is 95-96% and the closest to Noodlococcus was Kocuria rhizophila BT304 at 88.0%!
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Happy Noodlococcus Day!
On this day in 2019, we found Noodlococcus contaminating an old agar plate in our lab 🍜🦠
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These banana slice contaminants appeared on
@hannahpugh
's MRSA plates 🍌🧫
Anyone know what they might be?
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Merry Noodlococcus Day!
We discovered Noodlococcus contaminating a plate in our lab 4 years ago today 🍜🧫
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@merenbey
When we were trying to characterise Noodlococcus (a contaminant we got, first pic) and we finally worked out how to get it to form its secondary structure (we termed this process 'noodlation' 🍜)
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Fleming found that the "mould juice" was produced by the fungi Penicillium, and named the "juice" penicillin.
Nearly a decade later, penicillin was isolated and purified by a team lead by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain and became available for medical use by the early 1940s 💊
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It has to be Noodlococcus, what a beauty
What was your favorite microbial photo of 2019? Let’s see it! 🦠🔬🧫
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We are trying to measure growth of Noodlococcus using a plate reader measuring OD600, but it grows a clump in broth (see vid) so we think this would affect OD...
Does anyone have any idea how we can stop it growing as a clump? We have tried adding Tween but it still clumps
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If you're at
#MicroBio24
, come and visit posters B080 and B090 during the poster sessions, we've got some Contam Calendars and stickers to give out! 🦠
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Microbiology is beautiful 😍
Check out this incredible home-made agar plate🧫:
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This fascinated Fleming, who carried on growing the mould and experimenting with it. He found that the bacteria were being killed by "mould juice", which he found could kill many different species of bacteria 🍄🦠
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This contaminant grew on
@pRobM91
's plate a couple of years ago... Definitely looks like the Eye of Sauron 👁️
Grew on LB + sodium arsenate + nalidixic acid at room temperature
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What could this wrinkly contaminant on
@tiffany02uk
's SAB plate be? Whatever it is it's beautiful 😍
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If you haven't caught up on the fascinating
#BlueSoup
contamination story then be sure to check out this thread about
@bielleogy
and
@ATinyGreenCell
's investigation! 🥣🦠⤵️
Ok I'm outing myself here but there was forgotten beef soup in our fridge we just cleaned it out and it was BLUE?!?!? Wtf contam would make it blue??? Like BRIGHT blue!! 🤢🤮 Even w/ all my years in micro I'm not handling this well.
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Come and see poster P378 during today's poster session at
#Microbio23
to hear about the Kocurious case of Noodlococcus - the contaminant that started ContamClub! 🦠🧫🍜
We have a few freebies to give away including stickers and a limited number of ContamCalendars
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This plate had been contaminated by some mould. Normally, when plates are contaminated, scientists throw them away (after photographing to send to ContamClub, of course).
However, Fleming noticed something interesting: the Staphylococcus near the mould seemed to be dead 🦠💀
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Slow motion Noodlococcus! 🍜 (Sound on for a romantic experience)
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Earlier this week, we had a chat with
@jw_tsang
about discovering Noodlococcus 🍜🦠 and creating Contamination Club 🧫
Check out the blog post here:
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We have had a great day visiting the lab where Alexander Fleming discovered the contaminant that gave us penicillin! 🧫🍄
Thanks to
@KBrownHistorian
for giving us a great, informative tour!
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If you're attending
#Microbio23
then be sure to check out our Noodlococcus poster (P378)! We'll be there at the poster presentation session tomorrow talking all things Noodlococcus and ContamClub - and we even have a few ContamCalendars to give away 🧫🍄🦠🍜
@MicrobioSoc
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These fluffy contaminants grew in
@GEMcCallum
's BHI broth. The big one is named Julian and the rest are his children 👨👧👦
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Introducing Alex (
@The_Wildsmith
)!
He's an MRes student who is currently characterising Noodlococcus to find out if it's a new species 🦠
We've got various experiments lined up but if anyone has any cool ideas for stuff to do with Noodlococcus let us know!
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A very fluffy mould growing on some neglected mozzarella 😍☁️
Essa mussarela que ficou esquecida meio século no fundo da minha geladeira ainda está boa pra consumo não está?
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Very excited to announce we'll be running a Track Hub at
#ASMMicrobe2020
in Chicago in June thanks to
@goleylab
! 🇺🇸🦠
We'll be presenting Contamination Club, a brief history of contamination, and the wonderful story of Noodlococcus!
Full details here:
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Anyone at
#Microbio22
, come along to posters A239 / A274 / A267 to chat to us about our science, ContamClub, or Noodlococcus! We also have a few ContamCalendars to give out 🦠🍜🎁
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Quick update: Noodlococcus continues to confound us. 🤔
The DNA extraction went fine and our DNA looks good, but something about Noodlococcus is making sequencing very difficult so we still need to optimise it...
We'll be trying again later this week to get a full genome! 🧬
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💥CONTAM CALENDAR GIVEAWAY💥
The ContamCalendar will go on sale next week, but here's your chance to win one now!
Just follow
@ContamClub
, retweet this tweet, and reply with where you'll display your
#ContamCalendar
🗓️
The winner will be randomly selected on Monday @ 3pm UTC 🎲
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Waiting to board our flight to
#Microbio22
@MicrobioSoc
Look out for us wearing these badges around the venue
#NoodlesOnTour
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🗓️ CONTAM CALENDARS AVAILABLE NOW 🗓️
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All the calendars are here!!! Ready for packing and posting. They're beautiful 😍😍😍
👉
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🚨 CONTAM CALENDAR 2024 🚨
AVAILABLE NOW ➡️ ⬅️
First 20 orders will get a ContamClub sticker!!!
We hope you love this year's ContamCalendar showcasing some of our favourite submissions from the ContamClub community 📆🦠🍄🧫 Keep contaminating! ❤️
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Thank you so much for 5000 followers!
When we started this account, our goal was to celebrate and appreciate the innate curiously of microbiologists around the world. We are happy to see so many people enjoying this with us - we have now had hundreds of contaminants submitted!
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We just cleared our cold room out of some pre-pandemic-plates, here's a selection of some cool contaminants we found 🧫🦠🍄
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I miss finding cool looking contaminants on old plates in the cold room 😢
Hope everyone is continuing to stay well and safe 💚
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Thank you everyone for all the responses, they are really helpful! We tried growing it with 2mm glass beads ±Tween (0.05%) in conical flasks and it seems to have worked. Also tried Triton X-100 but it barely grew in that.
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These contaminants are so beautiful 😍😍😍
@ContamClub
: Just a small selection of contaminated plant tissue culture plates from the BioPrinter project at
@bioCURIOUSlab
. The growth media is color coded, which makes it even more dramatic.
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🤮
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Anyone know what's on
@StephLV12
's beautiful breakfast plate? It was all grown on GM17 agar.🍳🤔
_________
P.S.
@GordonRamsay
(rate this nutritious meal)
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Multiple different types of moulds found growing in
@hjlrsn
's forgotten can of peeled tomatoes 🍅🍄
Love the diversity 😍 can anyone identify any of them?
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Happy new year🎉
Hope you're enjoying the first page of the ContamCalendar 📆🦠🌻
Still some available at
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A nice surprise found growing in the bottom of our autoclave after the Christmas break 🍄
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The calendars have arrived! Can't wait to start shipping these out next week📬
They're selling fast so make sure to get your order in soon so that your 2023 can be filled with wonderful contaminants 🗓️🧫🦠🍄
Available at⤵️
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Noodlococcus!!!
No
#AprilFoolsDay
joke to offer y’all but after many hours in the lab, I successfully cracked the code for growing Ramen noodles in culture!
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Not a contaminant but an important message from E. coli for our American followers:
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Bright orange Noodlococcus-like contaminants on
@mulecc
's sucrose plate 😍🧡 any ideas what's growing?
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