Source Author Nabeel Adobe stock #795674473
Background
The majority of microbial species on our planet remain uncultivated and unexplored. This invention bypasses the challenges of cultivation in the lab by moving cultivation into nature on the premise that nature contains everything microbes need to grow. This invention describes a simple and inexpensive device for massively parallel microbial cultivation in nature AND their isolation into the pure culture in one step.
Technology Overview
Northeastern University researchers have developed a novel method of in situ cultivation of environmental microorganisms inside diffusion chambers. The rationale for such an approach was that diffusion would provide cells inside the chamber with naturally occurring growth components and enable those species that grew in nature at the time of the experiment to also grow inside the diffusion chambers.
Here Northeastern University researchers transform this methodology into a high-throughput technology platform for massively parallel cultivation and isolation of previously uncultivated microbial species from a variety of environments. Northeastern researchers have designed and tested an isolation chip (ichip) composed of several hundred miniature diffusion chambers, each inoculated with a single environmental cell. It shows that microbial recovery in the ichip exceeds manyfold that afforded by standard cultivation, and the grown species are of significant phylogenetic novelty. The new method allows access to a large and diverse array of previously inaccessible microorganisms and is well suited for both fundamental and applied research.
Benefits
- It makes it possible to produce a disposable device
- It eliminates the problems of contamination with re-usable chips
- A major contribution to resolve the contamination problem is also that the very design and assembly of the new device make errors virtually impossible even for an inexperienced user
Applications
- Academic studies of microbial diversity
- Discovery of bioactive molecules
Opportunity
- License
- Partnering
- Research collaboration
Patents (2)
Seeking
- Development partner,
- Commercial partner,
- Licensing
