There’s something in the agar
Many of us have heard horror stories involving ghosts, monsters, or pulling an all-nighter before your thesis defense. But picture this: you’re running a simple yeast-plating experiment in your lab, and when you return to check in on your cells, nothing’s there.
That’s what happened to yeast geneticist Reine Protacio in the summer of 2023. Protacio studies meiosis in the fission yeast species Schizosaccharomyces pombe at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. When students started struggling to plate the yeasts, and when even the control plates were turning up empty, she knew something was wrong.
Systematically switching out components of the culture media revealed that water, ammonium sulfate, glucose, and supplements weren’t responsible for the problem. But when Protacio and her team tested different lots of agar, they noticed that cells grew as expected on some lots but didn’t grow effectively on others. The culprit was surprising, as agar isn’t used to feed cells but rather to make the culture media solid.
“The agar was sort of an afterthought,” Protacio says.
The researchers reasoned that a toxin in some lots of agar might sporadically prevent yeast from growing. Protacio’s lab notified the company that had sold it the agar. The company’s CEO told the Atlantic that the firm had been able to grow fission yeast on agar from the same batch but didn’t dispute the lab’s findings. Protacio’s team also collected information from other scientists who had encountered similar issues plating yeast.
“It had happened to other people before, and it seemed like no one had ever figured out what the problem was,” Protacio says. “And so we decided to write it up.” The researchers titled their preprint “Laboratory Horror Stories: Poison in the Agar” (bioRxiv 2024, 10.1101/2024.06.06.597796), but the formal publication has a less evocative title: “Agar Lot-Specific Inhibition in the Plating Efficiency of Yeast Spores and Cells” (G3: Genes, Genomes, Genet. 2024, DOI: 10.1093/g3journal/jkae229).
“It’s funny we call it a horror story, but it was in a way,” Protacio tells Newscripts. “It was a simple experiment; it was an experiment that needed to be done, but we couldn’t get it to work. And I guess that’s what made it so alarming, was that this is a very standard assay that we use all the time.”
What’s in this urn?
If you walk around the neighborhood on Halloween night, you’re bound to see at least some skeleton costumes or decorations. It’s not just the general public that’s captivated by bones: new discoveries based on human and animal remains frequently adorn the pages of leading journals. Yet an urn containing the cremated bones of an ancient Roman man made headlines earlier this year—not necessarily for the remains themselves but for the reddish liquid they were submerged in. Archaeologists discovered the urn in a tomb that was unearthed in 2019 while work was being done on a house in southern Spain. The tomb dates back to the first century, when the Roman empire ruled in the area. Researchers knew that wine played an important role in Roman burial rituals, and if the reddish concoction was indeed the alcoholic beverage, it would make the drink the oldest wine found in liquid form.
Much of the liquid’s organic material had decayed after sitting in the tomb for around 2 millennia. The researchers targeted their search to look for polyphenols, which are compounds found in plants that scientists sometimes use to authenticate wines.
The team was delighted to find seven different polyphenols in the reddish liquid, including many that are also found in certain modern-day wines from southern Spain. The absence of syringic acid, a polyphenol that forms when the pigment in red wine breaks down, indicated that the mysterious liquid was in fact a white wine (J. Archaeol. Sci.: Rep. 2024, DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104636).
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