Question

State why different types of media are used for different microorganisms

Answer 1

• A culture media is a particular type of medium used for the growth of microorganisms in microbiological laboratories or we can say that culture media is the food used to grow microbes under specific conditions.
• A culture medium contains different kinds of nutrients and other essential components needed for the microbial growth.
• Actually microorganisms are composed of very different and taxonomically diverse groups.
• Culturing microorganisms for different kinds of research is challenging because they  need different kinds of culture medium due to the highly specific nutritional and environmental requirements.
• Various kinds of microorganisms succeed at different environmental conditions and have different growth requirements like; nutrients,vitamins,pH,temperature, and osmotic conditions.Because of this different requirements and needs microbiologist has to use different types of culture media for different microbes.
• Microbial culture media can be of varying type,depending on the nutritional growth requirements of the microbe.
• Simple,synthetic or complex media are used for the growth of bacteria,where they vary in nutritional components.
• For the growth of a fungus, usually microbiologist uses a media containing high carbohydrate and nitrogen source and they need a temperature ranging from 15 to 37°c at a pH 5 to 6 .Natural and synthetic media are the two types of fungal culture media.
• Among Bacteria, Different strain needs different culture medium according to their growth factors the same can happen in fungus and other microbial group.
• In case of streptococci,they do not grow rigorously in ordinary growth media.Here we can use Blood agar which is a type of growth medium that encourages the growth of bacteria like streptococci.