Description of Media: Terrific Broth is a nutritionally rich media developed by Tartoff and Hobbs for the culture and proliferation of Escherichia coli. Recombinant strains have been shown to have an extended growth phase in the medium. Terrific Broth supports high cellular density and is commonly used during cultivation of bacteria for plasmid isolation or in vitro protein expression.
Our method:
Typically growth in broth is measured visually, or by measuring the optical density of the broth after incubation. While these are considered acceptable methods, for this analysis Alpha Biosciences’ QC laboratory took another approach to obtain more quantified results. We performed a Growth Comparison test by inoculating prepared duplicate tubes of each leading commercial provider’s Terrific Broth in parallel, with pure ATCC cultures and incubated for 24 hours. Next, we sub-cultured equal aliquots of equally serial-diluted suspensions of the cultured broth onto duplicate Standard Methods Agar (SMA). We incubated the inoculated SMA plates for 24 hours and counted all plates with 30-300 colonies, and averaged the duplicates. We then calculated the growth increase as cfu/mL of each strain for each provider and graphed the results.
